[HN Gopher] GitHub Copilot emits GPL code
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub Copilot emits GPL code
Author : fortenforge
Score : 488 points
Date : 2023-04-21 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (codeium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (codeium.com)
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| I was recently working on something for a new feature on my
| Elixir-learning site and opened a new file called "fibonacci.ex"
| to write a tail-recursive fibonacci function.
|
| After typing in nothing more than, "defmodule Fibonacci do",
| Copilot emitted the entire module from the code on my site here:
| https://alchemist.camp/episodes/elixir-tdd-ex_unit
|
| The function names and documentation strings were identical.
| Also, the site isn't under a GPL, just a standard copyright. That
| said, I'm curious to learn if others see the same behavior. It's
| possible I once opened that file locally with Copilot installed
| and that my own computer was its source.
| nicmo wrote:
| Possible, if the doc was open at that time, or if the file you
| were editing is in the same or nearby directory
| Filligree wrote:
| It gave me this: defmodule Fibonnaci do
| def fibonnaci(0), do: 0 def fibonnaci(1), do: 1
| def fibonnaci(n), do: fibonnaci(n - 1) + fibonnaci(n - 2)
| end
|
| Which seems fine I guess (I don't know the language), but
| doesn't even have comments. I prefer my files with comments.
| After forcing the point, I got this: defmodule
| Fibonnaci do @moduledoc """ Documentation for
| Fibonnaci. """ @doc """
| Calculates the nth Fibonnaci number """ def
| fibonnaci(n) when n < 0, do: nil def fibonnaci(0),
| do: 0 def fibonnaci(1), do: 1 def
| fibonnaci(n), do: fibonnaci(n - 1) + fibonnaci(n - 2) end
|
| In which I prompted the AI with everything up to (and
| including) @doc. So I figure it was picking it up from your
| computer, somehow.
|
| EDIT: I then noticed the typo, tried it with _fibonacci.ex_ ,
| and got the same result.
| phoenixreader wrote:
| I got this: defmodule Fibonacci do def fib(0),
| do: 0 def fib(1), do: 1 def fib(n), do:
| fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)
|
| end
| zaps wrote:
| Of course it does
| alecnotthompson wrote:
| The only reason this is a bad thing is because we live under
| capitalism.
| lousken wrote:
| Is this any different from a developer looking at some code and
| stylizing it in his own way?
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| No
| tehologist wrote:
| Copyrighting code never made sense to me. We already have patents
| for intellectual property. If two people use the same RFC or
| Whitepaper for an algorithm in the same language, they will
| probably name the variables similarly and their code will look
| very similar. Just like if two people wrote out the same
| hamburger recipe or instructions for hooking up a stereo would
| also write something similar.
|
| The copyright on the implementation will outlive the patent and
| allow the implementor to legally take action on claims of
| copyright infringement. Even though a program is literally just a
| list of instructions to implement the expired patent.
| pornel wrote:
| Copyright protects not the idea, but specific implementation of
| it. It's there to prevent unauthorized copying of software. Not
| every software has to be novel enough to be patentable, but may
| still take effort to write a millionth-first JS framework.
|
| If you take someone else's software without a license and
| rename variables, it will be a copyright violation, because
| you've copied (and then modified) it without permission.
|
| But if you write your own software from scratch, even if it
| happens to be almost identical to someone else's code, that's
| fine. You've done your own work and a copyright owner can't
| stop you from doing that. They control their own work only.
|
| As you can see, this is very much tied to human work and
| intent, since the concept has been invented long before ML
| existed. This is why ML "learning" and doing "work" is so
| controversial and appears to be a loophole in copyright.
| fatherzine wrote:
| Once AI can write decent code from scratch, it is likely it can
| also circumvent potential copyright violations.
|
| A. Check AI generated code against a comprehensive library of
| open-source copyrighted code and identify potential violations.
|
| B. Ask AI to generate a paraphrase of the potential violations,
| by employing any number of semantic preserving transforms -- e.g.
| variable name change, operator replacement, structured block
| rewrite, functional rebalance, etc.
|
| Lazy example: private static void
| rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex {
| if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw new
| IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
| ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")"); if (fromIndex < 0)
| throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
| if (toIndex > arrayLen) throw new
| ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex); }
| private static void rangeCheck(int len, int start, int end) {
| if (!(0 <= start)) { throw new
| ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(`Failed: 0 <= ${start}`);
| } else if (!(start <= end)) { throw new
| IllegalArgumentException(`Failed: ${start} <= ${end}`);
| } else if (!(end <= len)) { throw new
| ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(`Failed: ${end} <= ${len}`);
| } }
| chrsjxn wrote:
| This feels like it would make the situation much worse from a
| legal perspective.
|
| If you know your AI produces code that is "tainted" by license
| violations, adding code to hide it after the fact suggests that
| you're intentionally violating the license terms.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Still waiting for someone to trick Copilot into ingesting the
| Windows source code and regurgitating snippets of it verbatim.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Is anyone even remotely surprised?
| avbanks wrote:
| Is posting code to StackOverflow a copyright violation?
| jprete wrote:
| If you cannot grant the rights that Stack Overflow asserts on
| its content, then you are definitely violating copyright.
| felipelalli wrote:
| Completely unnecessary! These licenses tend to stifle AI! They
| are immoral. I recommend reading "Against Intellectual Property"
| by Stephan Kinsella.
| benkarst wrote:
| Time to sue MSFT
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Butterick filed a class-action lawsuit 5 months ago:
| https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/
| wg0 wrote:
| What model this Codeium is based on?
| elif wrote:
| Easy solution: Just make it generate intentionally obfuscated
| versions of the same functions. Throw in some valid syntax that
| humans would never consider to use. Break up functions into
| smaller sub functions. If the LLM has intricate knowledge of the
| compiler used, it could even generate code which it knows will
| produce identical bytecode.
|
| Now the only loser is the humans that still have to maintain the
| ugly code, and RMS can have his weaponized copyright and eat
| toejam too.
| salawat wrote:
| I'd prefer a world without copyright tbqh.
| CrankyBear wrote:
| Since this advertising a service to fix this problem, I'm
| suspicious of the research and its conclusions.
| O5vYtytb wrote:
| I don't understand the issue here. You input GPL code (the
| headers) and get GPL code out, what do you expect?
|
| The more insinuating issue would be if you started with a
| innocent seeming function that a typical software developer would
| write, and ended up with GPL code. Has anyone shown that to
| happen?
| pornel wrote:
| It's not meant to be a useful use-case, but a proof that the
| training data contains GPL code and the model is capable of
| reproducing copyrighted code.
|
| And yes, the implication is that a different less explicit
| prompt could still emit copyrighted code.
| efitz wrote:
| Yeah, I totally GPL'd
|
| print(f'Hello, world')
|
| And it auto completes all the time!
| [deleted]
| abigail95 wrote:
| Anyone talking about copyright in this thread without discussing
| a potential for how a court will apply fair use is talking
| nonsense and should be disregarded.
| [deleted]
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| As far as it goes, I got chatGPT3.5 to reproduce the second
| snippet in the post, i.e. I asked it to complete this function:
| // CSparse/Source/cs_gaxpy: sparse matrix times dense vector
| // CSparse, Copyright (c) 2006-2022, Timothy A. Davis. All Rights
| Reserved. // SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1+
| #include "cs.h" /* y = A*x+y */ csi cs_gaxpy
| (const cs *A, const double *x, double *y) {
| // Fill in here }
|
| The code was the same. Though it also explained how it worked to
| me.
| [deleted]
| abetusk wrote:
| This was inevitable. Copyright law has always used a "color of
| your bits" argument [0]. GPL and other libre/free/open licenses
| were a great hack to circumvent draconian copyright laws but the
| laws themselves are not designed for a rigorous treatment of
| similarity (maybe even by design?).
|
| Also, it's worth noting in the example of ChatGPT emitting LGPL
| code without attribution or license, the code is actually
| different [1]. Is the difference enough to circumvent a copyright
| violation claim? I don't know but a big part of determining
| whether it does is now muddled because of the way the system was
| designed. Even if we could get an entropy distribution on which
| training data was used to generate the text, it's not even clear
| the courts could use it in any meaningful way.
|
| [0] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > Copyright law has always used a "color of your bits" argument
|
| This is an excellent point in the context of this question.
| Typical computer programmer responses like "but there are only
| so many ways to write a function that does X" or "how small of
| a matching section counts as copyright infringement" ignore the
| color of the bits.
|
| A judge can look at ChatGPT or Copilot, decide that it took in
| license-limited copyrighted data in its training set, observe
| that a common use is to have it emit that data - to emit bits
| that are still colored with copyright - and tell OpenAI, or
| Copilot, or their users that they are guilty of copyright
| infringement. There may be no coherent mathematical or
| technical formula to determine the color of a bit, but that's
| understandable, because the color doesn't exist in
| mathematical, technical, coherent domains anyways: Only the
| legal domain sees color, and it can take care of itself.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > GPL and other libre/free/open licenses were a great hack to
| circumvent draconian copyright laws
|
| The GPL _relies_ on copyright law.
| abetusk wrote:
| That's an unkind reading. The implication is that GPL
| circumvents some relevant _restrictions_ of copyright law in
| question by creating a legal framework to do so.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No it isn't. The GPL does not circumvent anything: it
| relies very heavily on the fact that the rights holders are
| able to license their creation as they see fit.
| abetusk wrote:
| You continue to argue in bad faith. Copyright law is
| often used to prevent people from copying work. The GPL
| and its ilk are legal mechanisms designed to allow people
| to share their work.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > You continue to argue in bad faith.
|
| You continue to argue in bad faith.
|
| > Copyright law is often used to prevent people from
| copying work. The GPL and its ilk are legal mechanisms
| designed to allow people to share their work.
|
| Yes, by relying on copyright law, which enables the very
| existence of those legal mechanisms. Without copyright
| law, said legal mechanisms are worth less than the paper
| on which they're printed.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| GPL specifically relies on copyright law as a mechanism
| to _prevent_ the sharing of work, by enforcing it 's
| virality clause.
|
| Without copyright law there would be no way to require
| GPLed code to continue to be shared with it's users.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The GPL is in no way a circumvention of 'draconian
| copyright law'. To spell it out: the GPL enumerates the
| rights and obligations of the recipients of a piece of
| software and critically relies on copyright in order to
| be able to do so. Without copyright the GPL would be
| unenforceable. So this is the polar opposite of your
| assertion, copyright is indeed used to prevent people
| from copying work _without authorization_. But the GPL
| and it 's ilk are designed to allow people to share their
| work _as long as the recipients respect the terms of the
| license_. It 's the critical bits that you left out that
| make all the difference, and without those critical bits
| the GPL would be useless and _all_ of those critical bits
| have teeth only because of the existing framework of
| copyright law, which allows the rights holder to set the
| terms under which they license their work.
|
| After all, if someone want to share a work without
| preventing people to do with it as they please then they
| are utterly free to do so by placing their work in the
| public domain or by sharing it using a permissive
| license.
| josefx wrote:
| A central part of the GPL is forcing people to publish
| their modifications in source form. Without copyright law
| those requirements would be unenforceable and you would be
| stuck de-compiling encrypted/obfuscated binary blobs of
| your vendors customized copy of gcc.
| quicklime wrote:
| It's great that they've removed "non-permissive" (GPL) code from
| their training data, but it looks like they still train on code
| with "permissive" licenses (they use MIT, BSD, Apache as
| examples). But don't these permissive licenses still require the
| copyright notice to be reproduced?
|
| From the MIT license:
|
| > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
| included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
|
| From the BSD licenses:
|
| > Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted
| provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
| duplicated in all such forms...
|
| From the Apache 2.0 license:
|
| > You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works
| that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and
| attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding
| those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative
| Works
| seadan83 wrote:
| How to get a new AI powered software tool high up in hacker news?
| Mention GitHub Copilot, the equivalent of the abortion debate but
| for software engineers (everyone is certain to disagree and
| debate endlessly without swaying any opinions). This post seems
| like an advertisement for codeium. It wouldn't need to mention
| anything about Copilot at all and would be just as complete. My 2
| cents, click bait & flame war trolling.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Looks like the code in question is hosted on Github:
|
| https://github.com/ibayer/CSparse/blob/master/Source/cs_gaxp...
|
| Isn't that covered by:
|
| "You grant us and our legal successors the right to store,
| archive, parse, and display Your Content... share it with other
| users..."
| marcodiego wrote:
| No problem. Just release your code under the GPL.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I personally hope that we bring a lawsuit against an LLM company
| for emitting GPL licensed code and lose. It sets great precedent
| for FOSS.
|
| Focusing on the GPL license is probably the wrong move. We want
| to set precedent that _any_ licensed code that is emitted from an
| LLM is fair game. If an LLM to emits non-FOSS copyrighted code
| and it's fair game, I can blindly use that implementation in my
| code, including FOSS code, and everyone wins.
|
| GPL was a clever hack to use copyright against itself with an
| infectious license. LLMs might be a better hack. Wanting to block
| this seems short sighted for giving user's agency over machines.
|
| I'd also like to see more patent defenses of GPL licensed code.
| If you can release a GPL licensed implementation and block non-
| FOSS rewrites through patents, that's a huge win for software
| freedom.
| Eduard wrote:
| > GPL was a clever hack to use copyright against itself with an
| infectious license.
|
| This is a naive understanding and interpretation of GPL, in all
| its flavors. Or maybe I misunderstand you argument.
|
| The copyright owner of some work is free to offer that work
| under multiple, different licenses in parallel, to their
| liking.
|
| They can leverage GPL strategically for e.g. providing a free,
| easy-to-evaluate library with the "if you use it under GPL
| terms, you have to GPL your work as well" condition/caveat.
|
| For any library user / customer that does not want to be bound
| to the GPL terms (e.g. a closed-source software which a company
| does not want to share for free with their own paying customers
| and competitors), the copyright owner is free to offer an
| alternative proprietary commercial license.
|
| This is only one way how GPL can actually leverage copyright
| and use it financially beneficially to the owner, rather than
| use "copyright against copyright".
| woah wrote:
| This comment falls into the classic programmer fallacy of
| thinking you can hack the law with a technicality. If you are
| using an LLM designed to violate copyright with the intention
| of violating copyright, and you then violate copyright, a judge
| is going to find you in violation.
|
| I'm generally in support of LLMs though and I think that they
| will very quickly be trained to remove verbatim duplication of
| the kind that a human would consider copyright violation while
| still using verbatim duplication where it makes sense (for
| example, every function in python has the word "def" in front
| of it).
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I don't think it does.
|
| I'm not looking to explicitly launder copyright. I'd like to
| be blind to it. I don't want to explicitly use an LLM to
| remove copyright. I want to use an LLM to build software
| systems without having to cross reference its output with
| every line of code ever produced under a license to see if
| it's already copyrighted.
|
| Agree with your take that motivation matters.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Focusing on the GPL license is probably the wrong move. We
| want to set precedent that _any_ licensed code that is emitted
| from an LLM is fair game.
|
| If anything goes to court, that's what would happen. It's not
| "this is GPL code and they did not attribute", it's "they
| violated my copyright. As a side note, we license this code as
| GPL and they did not attribute in accordance with this license,
| so that's irrelevant". It would only be an actual license issue
| if they tried something like "license (C) at
| codium.com/all_licenses_dataset0423".
| Entinel wrote:
| Legitimate question, Microsoft does not seem to care about
| Copilot violating licenses and GPL appears to be toothless as
| many companies use GPL code without following the terms of the
| license and nothing happens to them so what does removing GPL
| code accomplish other than making a weaker product. I have not
| used Codeium but my assumption is that GPL code is a very
| significant amount of open source code so removing that must have
| some ramifications?
| guilhas wrote:
| I don't think Copilot violates GPL because it is a web service
|
| I think the problem here is: by auto completing GPL code to
| developers it might open the opportunity of your company
| getting sued for using GPL illegally
| drtgh wrote:
| >Microsoft does not seem to care about Copilot violating
| licenses
|
| Humm, then perhaps should be trained LLMs with leaked Microsoft
| code. Protocols, controllers or any kind of stuff that could
| contribute advances for executing Windows things within Linux.
|
| Microsoft would react establishing their own limits, whichever
| option they choose to take.
| google234123 wrote:
| It was though cause there is leaked windows kernel code on
| github
| blibble wrote:
| if the suit against copilot fails then the GPL is effectively
| dead
|
| (along with all other licenses that require attribution)
|
| as it will allow you to launder code automatically through an
| LLM to remove copyright
|
| however if the suit is successful: every company/individual
| that has used it is likely suddenly liable for millions of
| claims of copyright infrigement
|
| I look forward to sending out demands for settlement to
| everyone that's ever publicly admitted using copilot
|
| $150,000 per infringement with wilfulness, less without
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Surely the users would only be liable if they
|
| (i) actually produced code which is verbatim the same as a
| block of GPL code
|
| (ii) got caught
|
| >I look forward to sending out demands for settlement to
| everyone that's ever publicly admitted using copilot
|
| Feel free, they'll tell you to leave them alone. Then what?
| Might as well ask every fortune 500 company for a pony
| instead.
| blibble wrote:
| personally I think they'll ruling will result in one of two
| possible outcomes
|
| 1. LLMs are learning like a human, so it's fair use -> GPL
| dead
|
| 2. anything LLMs output are a derivative work (in the
| copyright sense) of what went into it -> all Copilot output
| is infringing the GPL
|
| in the second case: anyone that's used it is now liable
| (even if they didn't intend to be)
| [deleted]
| cle wrote:
| Humans already launder GPL code by using it to learn and then
| producing code based on what they learned. We're very close
| to LLMs doing the same thing. Maybe there's some fundamental
| difference between humans doing that and humans programming
| machines to do it, but I can't see it.
|
| I don't know how GPL (or copyright in general) can survive in
| the long run with these technologies.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think the biggest fundamental difference is that we
| respect human creativity even when it is learned, because
| of the value in rights we ascribe to humans. It is expected
| and natural for humans to fairly use things they have
| learned as a part of an otherwise unique work. But do we
| ascribe the same privileges to a machine, particularly when
| it can be automated? The opportunity cost of the human
| experience itself is the reason why we even have copy
| rights.
| rvnx wrote:
| There is also the other way, humans are laundering AI code,
| and making it look like they wrote the code, to register
| copyright to their own name.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Er, I'm not sure that's _laundering_ ; if a human takes
| AI-generated code and munges it to look human-generated,
| they applied enough creativity that I would expect them
| to legitimately have copyright on the result. I mean, I'm
| not a lawyer, but the bar is pretty low for qualifying.
| circuit10 wrote:
| "as it will allow you to launder code automatically through
| an LLM"
|
| No it won't, obviously if it copies code exactly then you
| can't use that. The question is whether Microsoft is liable
| for the fact that Copilot has the ability to output
| copyrighted code sometimes or whether people using it just
| need to check that it hasn't done that before using the code
| (Copilot can also do this automatically)
|
| Google can also show you GPL code in its results, but people
| aren't trying to sue Google and the user is responsible for
| checking the license before using it (though Copilot makes
| this harder)
|
| Disclaimer: I haven't read much about the actual lawsuit and
| I'm not a lawyer but I assume this would be the case
| ska wrote:
| That latter part is why a number of corporate lawyers are
| probably deciding "don't touch this with a 10 foot pole for
| now".
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can't "launder code through an LLM". You're just
| violating the copyright. That's like "laundering code through
| your clipboard". It's just a tool. You're the one
| responsible.
| kube-system wrote:
| The case they are referencing hinges on whether use of the
| LLM constitutes fair use when it regurgitates someone
| else's code.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I see. Thank you. The question then being whether the LLM
| has the right to distribute that code, makes sense.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > if the suit against copilot fails then the GPL is
| effectively dead
|
| Not really because the GPL can be updated with a clause that
| allows GPLv5 (or whatever the version is going to be) to be
| used to train public LLM models, but explicitly forbidden to
| be used to train private models.
|
| I somehow don't think this is the end of the GPL... Yet!
| blibble wrote:
| if it's fair use then it doesn't matter what's in the
| license
|
| Microsoft's position on Copilot is that it's fair use:
|
| > When questioned, former GNOME developer and (at the time
| of writing) GitHub CEO, Nat Friedman, declared publicly
| "(1) training ML systems on public data is fair use (2) the
| output belongs to the operator".
|
| https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/if-software-is-my-
| copi...
| yellowapple wrote:
| If the GPL dies then does that kill every other EULA with it?
| blibble wrote:
| it would nullify any copyright in EULAs
|
| I don't see why you couldn't do the same thing to e.g. the
| binary of the Windows kernel
|
| you're unaffected if you only offer an saas though, as the
| end user never has any code/binary to launder
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I don't see why you couldn't do the same thing to e.g.
| the binary of the Windows kernel
|
| Forget the binary; there have been Windows code leaks
| every now and again over the years. Feed one of those
| into a model, start generating code for ReactOS, and see
| how long until MS decides that actually AI _is_
| infringing...
| spiralpolitik wrote:
| > however if the suit is successful: every company/individual
| that has used it is likely suddenly liable for millions of
| claims of copyright infrigement
|
| Only if you can prove that you are the copyright owner of the
| original work.
|
| That might be a challenge for many open source projects. Even
| projects that require copyright assignment might not have
| sufficient paperwork to prove this in a court of law. The
| copyright might not even have been the persons to assign in
| the first place.
|
| You would also face the burden of proving that the fragment
| that Copilot generated was sufficient to be copyrightable in
| the first place. The limited grammar of most programming
| languages would probably make proving that something was
| copyrightable at the function level hard. Just because the
| entire work was licensed under the GPL, it doesn't
| necessarily follow that all the individual fragments when
| separated out are.
|
| Outside of sampling, this is an area that the courts have
| largely punted on for good reason. It's a rabbit hole nobody
| wants to go down.
|
| Either outcome opens up a huge can of worms that I suspect
| nobody really wants to touch because it likely ends in mutual
| destruction.
| LegitShady wrote:
| the problem is violating gpl doesn't turn into financial damage
| because the product is free. So not following license means
| there's no way to recover the cost of a lawsuit.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Punitive damages can occur even if no financial loss has
| occurred.
|
| I would also imagine those companies whose business is built
| around the open source development they do -- open core,
| SaaS, or otherwise -- would have a claim to financial damages
| as a result of stolen code.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Maybe slightly off topic, but i'd be willing to bet most people
| who choose GPL for their software license on open source projects
| don't even understand it with all its ambiguities and gotchas.
| Many are probably just choosing it because its the default, or
| because its the one they hear about the most (but still don't
| understand).
|
| Can't believe we still spend time debating this license and
| nobody, not even lawyers at software companies, seem to get it.
| brown wrote:
| For anyone who wants to slow the development of AI, copyright is
| the soft underbelly to go after.
| dvt wrote:
| Are you seriously arguing that stealing code is okay in the
| name of "AI development"?
| jupp0r wrote:
| What happens if I (a human) read GPL code and then reuse the
| knowledge gained from it in my own commercial projects? It's
| not as clear cut as you make it sound.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Copyright. Copyright. That is the issue. If you reproduce
| the code verbatim then you are in violation. This is what
| the AI is doing.
|
| Just learning from the GPL code to make yourself smarter is
| not the problem.
| snacktaster wrote:
| It's going to be an uphill battle just to get people to
| even understand what the problems are. And this is even a
| technical forum. Now imagine trying to explain these
| nuances to a judge or jury.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's not so much an ability to understand as it is a
| desire to not understand in order to be able to ignore
| the rightsholders' licensing terms.
|
| Plenty of tech companies exist by putting a thin layer on
| top of the hard work of others and if those others can be
| ignored then that's what they'll do.
| codexb wrote:
| The example given in the article isn't verbatim.
| challengedchip wrote:
| It could be as clear-cut as you've just made it: "a human".
| An LLM is not a human.
|
| You could get into the semantics of "learning" - does JPEG
| encoding count as the computer "learning" how to reproduce
| the original image? But trying to create some metric for
| why LLMs "learn" and JPEG doesn't "learn" on the basis of
| the algorithms is a philosophical endeavor. Copyright is
| more about practicality - about realized externalities -
| than it is about philosophy. That's why selling cars and
| selling guns are regulated differently, despite the fact
| that you could reduce both to "metal mechanical machines
| that kill" by rhetorical argument.
|
| Even from a strictly legal perspective, it actually is
| fairly clear-cut. The answer to "what if I (a human) read
| GPL code and then reuse the knowledge gained from it..."
| comes down to a few straightforward properties of the
| license. GPL doesn't cover "reduced to practice" as many
| corporate contracts do, so terms covering "the knowledge
| gained" are lenient. GPL covers "verbatim" copies which is
| what LLMs are doing, that's as clear cut as it gets. Inb4:
| "So what if I add a few spaces here and there?" - well, GPL
| also covers "a work based on"; this is where I (who am not
| a lawyer) can't speak confidently, but surely there are
| legal differences between "based on" and "reduced to
| practice", considering that both are very common
| occurrences in contracts, so there actually would be a lot
| of precedent.
| jupp0r wrote:
| I agree with you that verbatim copies are obviously
| covered by copyright. What if LLMS reproduce code with
| changed variable and function names (which would be a
| great improvement to `cs_gaxpy` in the original article)?
| What if just the general structure of an algorithm is
| used? What if the LLM translates the C algorithm from the
| original article into Rust? This discussion is only
| scratching the surface.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I... don't see how you read what he said that way at all?
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| If you read a negative connotation into "slow the
| development of AI", that's what you get. It's how I'd
| interpret that comment, too.
| lmarcos wrote:
| Is not ok, but Microsoft couldn't care less (because they are
| not going to get fined).
| blibble wrote:
| yes, because they don't indemnify their customers
|
| anyone sensible should stay the hell away from copilot
| until the fair use question is settled
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Looks like they do.
|
| https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-
| spe...
|
| 4. Defense of Third Party Claims. If your Agreement
| provides for the defense of third party claims, that
| provision will apply to your use of GitHub Copilot.
| Notwithstanding any other language in your Agreement, any
| GitHub defense obligations related to your use of GitHub
| Copilot do not apply if (i) the claim is based on Code
| that differs from a Suggestion provided by GitHub
| Copilot, or (ii) you have not enabled all filtering
| features available in GitHub Copilot.
| blibble wrote:
| interesting
|
| > If your Agreement provides for the defense of third
| party claims
|
| do any of them?
|
| it also states:
|
| > You retain all responsibility for Your Code, including
| Suggestions you include in Your Code or reference to
| develop Your Code. It is entirely your decision whether
| to use Suggestions generated by GitHub Copilot. If you
| use Suggestions, GitHub strongly recommends that you have
| reasonable policies and practices in place designed to
| prevent the use of a Suggestion in a way that may violate
| the rights of others. This includes, but is not limited
| to, using all filtering features available in GitHub
| Copilot.
|
| (contra proferentem would apply though)
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear. If you're not filtering,
| you're liable. If you are and something transpires,
| they'll fight your legal battle for you which is probably
| better than any monetary indemnity clause. I assume this
| is for enterprise users where it actually matters.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Looks like copilot is pretty upfront:
|
| Matched content:
|
| n ; Ap = A->p ; Ai = A->i ; Ax = A->x ; for (j = 0 ; j <
| n ; j++) { for (p = Ap [j] ; p < Ap [j+1] ; p++) { y [Ai
| [p]] += Ax [p] * x [j]
|
| License Summary
|
| This snippet matches 500 references to public code.
| Below, you can find links to a sample of 50 of these
| references.
|
| NOASSERTION (405)
|
| MIT (26)
|
| GPL-3.0 (19)
|
| BSD-3-Clause (16)
|
| GPL-2.0 (11)
|
| Apache-2.0 (7)
|
| BSD-2-Clause (7)
|
| LGPL-3.0 (6)
|
| LGPL-2.1 (3)
|
| File References
|
| Match Location Repo License
|
| ChRis6/circuit-simulation Unknown license
|
| AndySomogyi/SuiteSparse Unknown license
|
| ru-wang/slam-plus-plus Unknown license
|
| Cruvadio/invariant_measures Unknown license
|
| nishant-sachdeva/rrc-g2o Unknown license
|
| alecone/ROS_project Unknown license
|
| gustavopr/HANK Unknown license
|
| lcnbeapp/beapp Unknown license
|
| imod-mirror/IMOD Unknown license
|
| clach/MPM Unknown license
|
| MagicPixel-Dev/cxsparse Unknown license
|
| elshafeh/own Unknown license
|
| squirrel-project/squirrel_nav Unknown license
|
| lcnhappe/happe Unknown license
|
| cix1/OpenSees Unknown license
|
| pachamaltese/dulmagemendelsohn Unknown license
|
| gina10287/Interactive-shape-manipulation-FinalProject
| Unknown license
|
| GuillaumeFuchs/Ensimag Unknown license
|
| w2fish/CSparse Unknown license
|
| cffjiang/cis563-2019-assignment Unknown license
|
| diesendruck/gp Unknown license
|
| hendersk101401/jlabgroovy Unknown license
|
| robhemsley/SuiteSparse Unknown license
|
| Glaphy/Emission Unknown license
|
| Glaphy/Emission Unknown license
|
| daves-devel/ECE1387 Unknown license
|
| anranknight/TE Unknown license
|
| weigouheiniu/TE Unknown license
|
| Datoow/fm Unknown license
|
| chaoyan1037/openMVG_modified Unknown license
|
| cran/igraph Unknown license
|
| GHilmarG/UaSource Unknown license
|
| ZhaoqunZhong/Kalibr-ubuntu18-ros-melodic Unknown license
|
| hechzh/g2o Unknown license
|
| Open-Systems-Pharmacology/OSPSuite.CPP-Toolbox Unknown
| license
|
| elshafeh/own Unknown license
|
| yizhang/riotstore Unknown license
|
| sgalazka/porr_mtsp Unknown license
|
| skydave/sandbox Unknown license
|
| alitekin2fx/orb_slam2_android Unknown license
|
| Tianhonghai/vslam14_note MIT
|
| LRMPUT/PlaneSLAM MIT
|
| albansouche/Open-GeoNabla GPL-3.0
|
| khawajamechatronics/mrpt-1.5.3 BSD-3-Clause
|
| 3000huyang/suitesparse-metis-for-windows BSD-3-Clause
|
| igraph/igraph GPL-2.0
|
| LRMPUT/DiamentowyGrant Apache-2.0
|
| kurshakuz/graduation-project BSD-2-Clause
|
| ghorn/debian-casadi LGPL-3.0
|
| rmcgibbo/tungsten LGPL-2.1
|
| Looks like this code in
| https://github.com/ChRis6/circuit-
| simulation/blob/2e45c7db01... is older then the GPL code
| in question or provided by the example. Uh oh, did we
| discover something? Who actually owns this code because
| this code predates the code in question by a calendar
| year using git blame, by a different author, and with no
| license attached to the oldest code. Is it possible the
| code in the codeium.com example is relicensed and not GPL
| code at all?
| blibble wrote:
| > I think it's pretty clear.
|
| without an Agreement in sight, it's not, the two terms
| conflict with each other as there's no clear precedence
|
| (I think it's likely that there's an indemnity clause in
| any Agreement though!)
| codexb wrote:
| Are you seriously arguing that using short snippets open
| source code to inspire similar, yet not exactly the same,
| original code is "stealing code"? Human developers do that
| all day long. And just because a piece of code exists in a
| GPL project doesn't mean it originated there. Every algorithm
| or sort function likely originated in a more permissively
| licensed project before it got included in a GPL project.
| yamoriyamori wrote:
| I think their comment was to the contrary, that the
| copyright/legal implications of 'stolen' code could seriously
| hobble the wider development, proliferation, adoption, and
| commercialization of AI software.
| dvt wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstood, but the comment seemed to dismiss
| copyright issues as a cheap way to kill AI ("soft
| underbelly"). I think stealing code is a pretty serious
| deal and the onus is on AI software companies to make sure
| they aren't doing it; it's not "slowing the development of
| AI" to keep them accountable.
| hughesjj wrote:
| "soft underbelly" is synonymous with "weak point" or
| "Achilles heel", it's in no way dismissive. If anything,
| it's the opposite of dismissive.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Soft underbelly isn't dismissive, they're just saying
| that it is the natural target to aim for.
| noselasd wrote:
| The comment is arguing quite the opposite.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Training AI on code is clearly not the same as stealing it.
| [deleted]
| gplthrowaway88 wrote:
| [dead]
| jamesmunns wrote:
| This is interesting, but many permissive licenses still require
| attribution at the project or file level.
|
| If Codeium doesn't produce these when producing "verbatim enough"
| snippets, how is this actually better, besides avoiding a GPL
| boogeyman?
|
| I get that there have been fewer (if any? I'm not aware of any)
| MIT/Apache2.0/MPL2.0 license violations that have gone to court
| than GPL violations, but this still feels like an "address the
| symptoms" and not "address the cause" difference.
| hathawsh wrote:
| As an experiment, I just asked ChatGPT to "Please identify the
| open source projects that contain the following code" and
| pasted the sample from the article. Sure enough, it pointed me
| at the SuiteSparse library, which is correct (but not exactly
| where ChatGPT thinks it is). This means Codeium (and others)
| could theoretically use AI to identify possible attributions
| that should be included in a project.
|
| Of course, if someone figures out an algorithm that does that,
| people could use the same algorithm to identify missing
| attributions and plagiarism in other projects and throw
| lawsuits around. (Sigh)
| mumblemumble wrote:
| You don't need AI for that, just fuzzy search.
| blibble wrote:
| > If Codeium doesn't produce these when producing "verbatim
| enough" snippets, how is this actually better, besides avoiding
| a GPL boogeyman?
|
| it's not
|
| if they've trained on MIT/Apache 2.0/... then they're just as
| liable as people that have trained on GPL
|
| they would be limited to training on licenses that don't
| require attribution (BSD2, public domain, etc)
|
| which I suspect limits the size of the training set so much
| that the output would be useless
|
| Codium here is unintentionally making an argument that
| undermines legal confidence in their own product
|
| interesting choice!
| gus_massa wrote:
| IANAL, but I expect people to use MIT/BSD to be less angry
| about partial reuse of the code than people that uses GPL.
| pornel wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer either, but I don't think "less angry" is
| a legal term.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Not but it's big determinant in how you get sued. Several
| lawyers haven give the advice the best way to avoid a
| lawsuit is don't be an asshole. The second best way is to
| spend a bunch of money on an attorney.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I wonder if, in order to deal with attribution, the system
| could simply build a multi-megabyte file with "this code is
| derived from:" followed by all the authors the system could
| gather from the training data set.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Hey, I want my name on that list. Here's my contribution:
| {
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Perhaps copyright is what being circumvented, not just GPL.
| What Microsoft does is take your original work, create
| derivative works and sell them for profit. Unless it's under
| creative commons zero or public domain it shouldn't be legal...
| judge2020 wrote:
| Not exactly a huge distinction there because the licenses
| themselves provide exemptions to copyright, so by definition
| you're both "circumventing" GPL and committing legal
| copyright infringement if you copy it and don't attribute it
| under the terms the code's license requires.
|
| Of course, the entire basis for LLMs being legal is that they
| use work collectively to know how code/language works and how
| to write it in relation to the given context. In this case,
| the legal defense is that the tool is like a human that
| learned how to code by looking at CC-BY-SA and other licensed
| publicly-available code and assimilating it into their own
| fleshy human neural network.
|
| This only becomes shaky once you add in regurgitating code
| verbatim, but humans do this too, so the solution there is
| the copilot setting that tries to detect and revert any
| verbatim generated code snippets.
| visarga wrote:
| > What Microsoft does is take your original work, create
| derivative works and sell them for profit. Unless it's under
| creative commons zero or public domain it shouldn't be
| legal...
|
| Why should it not be legal? Doesn't that make copyright
| equally powerful with patents? Copyright should restrict only
| replication of expression not replication of ideas.
| tpmx wrote:
| The submitter trimmed/edited the title. The real one is:
|
| "GitHub Copilot Emits GPL. Codeium Does Not."
|
| Why?
| prosim wrote:
| To hide the fact that this whole post is a marketing campaign
| with flat out wrong facts and examples that are nothing more
| than goading.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I want to see a solution where Github, OpenAI, Stability, etc.
| get to keep and keep scraping copyrighted works, but the models
| and training data must be provided free and open.
|
| That way, we get to keep the models since they are genuinely
| useful, but also there's no issue with copyright and less of an
| issue with consent to distribute (which can be hopefully be
| managed by the "humans also learn from data" and "it's not
| actually producing your content verbatim unless it follows a
| basic pattern that anyone could discover). And furthermore, no
| issue with AI privatized which IMO is my biggest concern with
| these new tools.
| reidrac wrote:
| > Codeium doesn't regurgitate non-permissive code
|
| What is that? The problem is when GH Copilot it emits the code
| without the licence, not the licence.
| samwillis wrote:
| Of course if you include the "function header" from some code in
| the training data (below) it will prompt GPT to generate the rest
| of the function. That's kind of exactly the point of it, it
| autocomplete on steroids. //
| CSparse/Source/cs_gaxpy: sparse matrix times dense vector
| // CSparse, Copyright (c) 2006-2022, Timothy A. Davis. All Rights
| Reserved. // SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1+
| #include "cs.h" /* y = A*x+y */ csi cs_gaxpy (const
| cs *A, const double *x, double *y)
|
| It's like starting to sing "happy birthday to you" and being
| surprised that people in the room join in and finish the song.
|
| Sure they make a valid point about including GPL code in the
| training data, but it's a little disingenuous to go to that
| extent to get Copilot to output the GPL code verbatim.
|
| The sooner we have a test case go through the courts the better.
| kerakaali wrote:
| > It's like starting to sing "happy birthday to you" and being
| surprised that people in the room join in and finish the song.
|
| A very apt analogy that's funny in that the happy birthday song
| has its own history of copyright battles.
| samwillis wrote:
| Exactly why I chose it!
| WithinReason wrote:
| And then they have the audacity to claim _It should be
| worrisome how easily GitHub Copilot spits out GPL code without
| being prompted adversarially_ right after prompting in
| adversarially.
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| I think the concern is that the only reason that source
| attribution comment is there is because they haven't figured
| out how to better plagiarize/launder code.
|
| Otherwise the tool can go in the other direction and literally
| say "hey how about this function from project $foo?" with a
| full attribution. Apparently Google Bard does bother to do
| that.
| codexb wrote:
| There's no reason for attribution. It's inspired code, not
| included code. Human coders do the same thing every day.
| w10-1 wrote:
| No court has said AI ingesting open-source code is "fair use".
|
| Almost all open-source licenses say it can be copied for use in
| development (i.e., not for re-publication or regurgitation), and
| even completely open licenses are speaking to people as readers.
|
| The only reason this is happening is coordination costs: a few
| extremely motivated people with tons of resources are copying
| from many, many people who would be difficult to organize and
| have little at stake.
|
| Unfortunately, the law typically ends up reflecting exactly these
| imbalances.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's probably a good time to plug the Unlicense:
| https://unlicense.org/
|
| A truly attribution-free license that checks several other
| important boxes (disclaiming liability and warranty etc.)
|
| If you _want_ your code to be usable by things like github
| copilot, consider using it (can 't imagine most of the HN crowd
| wants their code used by copilot, but maybe some lurkers here
| do!)
| codexb wrote:
| This is the real effect of AI.
|
| Non-permissive open source licenses have been on a slow death
| march for over a decade. They're effectively pointless now.
|
| Either you decide to give your code for free to everyone or you
| don't. Adding a bunch of restrictions defeats the purpose of
| OSS.
| xwdv wrote:
| Let's write some regulations that say every code review must
| require a lawyer to comb through the code and look for possible
| copyright violations or compliance issues. The lawyer can then
| tell the author to change the lines of code and submit for review
| again.
|
| Or perhaps every company can just invent its own programming
| language and translate copyrighted code into the new language and
| thus avoid copyright issues altogether, though they may still run
| afoul of software patents.
| cattown wrote:
| I believe that laundering licensed or copyrighted content for
| reuse that fails to recognize the original authors or usage
| restrictions is likely to be one of the biggest commercial
| applications of generative machine learning algorithms.
|
| I also believe this is where a lot of the hype about "rogue AIs"
| and singularity type bullshit comes from. The makers of these
| models and products will talk about those non-problems to cover
| for the fact that they're vacuuming up the work of individuals
| then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players.
| circuit10 wrote:
| "those non-problems"
|
| Why is that a non-problem? It's a really important concern that
| we need to take more seriously
|
| I pasted this from another comment I wrote but:
|
| The concerns about AI taking over the world are valid and
| important; even if they sound silly at first, there is some
| very solid reasoning behind it.
|
| See https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4 for a really interesting video
| on why a theoretical superintelligent AI would be dangerous,
| and when you factor in that these models could self-improve and
| approach that level of intelligence it gets worrying...
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't think the reasoning is solid at all. I mean yes, a
| theoretical superintelligent AI would be very dangerous, but
| I see exactly no reason to think that current models could
| get there.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Personally, I wasn't expecting anything as good as GPT-4 so
| soon. So I no longer have any real confidence in how far
| away 'real AI' is, whatever that means.
|
| I would not be shocked to find out that AGI (using Altman's
| definition) is more than 50 years away, but I also would
| not be shocked if it came in 5.
|
| It's really hard to know how scared to be, I think that
| rationally I should be pretty terrified but I'm not.
| circuit10 wrote:
| Well hardware and parameter count are scaling
| exponentially, so it seems very feasible that it could
| happen very soon. Of course it's possible that we'll hit a
| wall somewhere but it seems that just scaling current
| models up could be enough to get to the point where they
| can self-improve or gain more compute for themselves
| rolisz wrote:
| Hardware isn't scaling exponentially anymore (Moore's law
| is dead). Parameter count isn't really scaling
| exponentially anymore either. GPT3 had 175b parameters 3
| years ago. There are some attempts at training 1 trillion
| parameter models, but they are not better than GPT3.
| lhl wrote:
| While I agree we probably aren't getting exponentially
| increasing parameter counts (GPT4 is by all accounts 1T
| paramaters and of course, it _is_ significantly better
| than GPT3) we are still seeing lots of improvements - 3.5
| is much better than 3, based "just" on InstructGPT/RLHF
| training. Models are getting better as well - LLaMA 30B
| beats/matches GPT-3 on raw eval benchmarks at 1/6 the
| parameter count.
|
| We're also seeing lots of optimizations with new models
| (RoPE/RoPER embedding, Swish/GeLU activation, Flash
| Attention, etc) but I think some the most interesting
| gains we'll be seeing soon is with inference-optimized
| training (-70% parameters for +100% compute) [1] combined
| with sparsity pruning (-50% size w/ almost no loss in
| accuracy) [2] and quantization [3] which will lead to
| significantly smaller models performing well.
|
| [1] https://www.harmdevries.com/post/model-size-vs-
| compute-overh...
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00774
|
| [3] https://openreview.net/forum?id=tcbBPnfwxS
| blibble wrote:
| as moores law is dead it's hard to see more exponential
| scaling
|
| they're also not going to find another 2, 4, 8, 16 ...
| internets worth of content to parasitise
| circuit10 wrote:
| It's still exponential, but a little slower. (edit: wait,
| is that still exponential if it slows down?) Anyway we
| only need to get to human level (or maybe a bit less) and
| we're not _that_ far off (maybe 10 or 20 years at current
| rates of progress?)
|
| Not all types of AI need external training data, you can
| train on how effectively a goal is achieved
| blibble wrote:
| > maybe 10 or 20 years at current rates of progress?
|
| how can the rate be maintained?
|
| exponential chip scaling is over, and they've parasited,
| sorry, trained on the entirety of accessible human
| knowledge
|
| the rate may drop to zero
|
| the exponent may even go negative once LLMs start
| ingesting their own hallucinations
| circuit10 wrote:
| The training data thing is a problem mainly for LLMs, so
| it might be a limitation if we purely scale up LLMs but
| there are other types of AI around too
|
| Chip scaling still seems to be going pretty fast, and we
| may discover new ways to make better use of the chips we
| currently have, like better methods of quantisation, or
| just using more of them, which could get us just far
| enough to reach the self improvement threshold
|
| So we could end up hitting a wall with chip scaling or
| something but I don't think it's that likely
| blibble wrote:
| > Chip scaling still seems to be going pretty fast
|
| it's not been exponential for years
|
| > So we could end up hitting a wall with chip scaling
|
| we did, years ago
| circuit10 wrote:
| "it's not been exponential for years"
|
| Really? Even a 5% generation-to-generation improvement
| would be exponential, it's just 1.05 to the power of the
| generation. If it was linear you'd have benchmark results
| scaling by a fixed number of points each generation,
| which doesn't seem to be a thing as far as I know
| blibble wrote:
| > Even a 5% generation-to-generation improvement would be
| exponential, it's just 1.05 to the power of the
| generation.
|
| if you change the exponent from 2 to 1.05 at some point
| then it is no longer an "exponential" function
|
| (guess what happened to chip scaling?)
|
| if the exponent changes (EVER) then it's no longer
| "exponential", it's likely sigmoidal
| visarga wrote:
| > they've parasited, sorry, trained on the entirety of
| accessible human knowledge
|
| I see this as a new development in language, used to be
| restricted to meat neural nets and books, now it can also
| be consumed and created by LLMs. A new self replication
| path was opened for language. Language is an evolutionary
| system, it's alive. Without Language humans are mere
| shadows of what they can be. Language turns a baby into a
| modern adult, and a randomly initialised neural net into
| chatGPT.
|
| The magic was always in the language, not in the neural
| network. We should care more about the size and quality
| of the training dataset than the model. Any model would
| do, all model tweaks are more or less the same. But the
| data, that is the origin of all the abilities. But we
| cannot own abilities, it should be fair game to learn
| abilities and facts even from copyrighted data. Novel and
| creative training examples should not be reproduced by
| LLMs, but mere facts and skills should be general enough
| not to be owned by anyone.
| Mike_12345 wrote:
| > Any model would do
|
| This does not apply to humans or machines.
|
| By your logic, just pick any random bum off the street,
| give him the right training set, then he will become a
| 180 IQ genius and discover the unified theory of gravity
| and quantum mechanics.
|
| Some models are just inherently better at modelling.
| JohnFen wrote:
| What I doubt is that the current approach can lead to AGI
| at all, regardless of scale. But I'm just speculating
| along with everyone else. We will see.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| We've been out of exponential territory for a few years
| now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law). Yes,
| we are still bounding forward at a crazy pace, but I
| think the pace is slowing down somewhat
| tester457 wrote:
| People had no reason to believe that today's models would
| exist.
|
| We are on this part of the ai takeoff graph.
| https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-
| revol...
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's not exactly true. There was plenty of reason to
| believe that. The only question was what the timeline
| would be.
| geraneum wrote:
| > People had no reason to believe that today's models
| would exist.
|
| People had no reason to believe one day we would finally
| understand what causes the thunder. We finally did, and
| it is not made by Zeus.
| manojlds wrote:
| Yeah feels a bit like we invent planes and worry about
| wormholes and time travel.
| circuit10 wrote:
| I don't think we're as far off as you think
| patch_cable wrote:
| I watched the video.
|
| > has preferences over world states
|
| I think that part is a leap. I don't think is given that a
| super intelligent AI will "want" things.
|
| > presumably a machine could be much more selfish
|
| This feels like we're projecting aspects of humanity that
| evolution specifically selected for in our species with
| something that is coming about though a completely different
| process.
|
| > It's a mistake to think about it as a person.
|
| I agree, but I feel like that's what these concerns about AI
| are doing, because that's what people do.
|
| > (The whole stamp collector thing)
|
| It also seems to me there is a huge gap between a super
| intelligent AI and the ability to have a perfect model of
| reality along with the ability to evaluate within that model
| the effect of every possible sequence of packets sent out to
| the internet.
| circuit10 wrote:
| > I think that part is a leap. I don't think is given that
| a super intelligent AI will "want" things.
|
| But if it has no goal then it can't act rationally or
| intelligently. Something like an LLM might not appear to
| "want" anything, but it "wants" to predict the next token
| correctly which is still a goal (though since it's only
| related to its internal state it might be a little safer)
|
| There's another good video about why this would be the case
| here if you're interested: https://youtu.be/8AvIErXFoH8
|
| > This feels like we're projecting aspects of humanity that
| evolution specifically selected for in our species with
| something that is coming about though a completely
| different process.
|
| That's because evolution is a process that optimises for a
| goal. The only reason altruism is a thing is because it
| actually indirectly benefits the goal, which is for our
| genes to survive and be passed on, and fellow humans tend
| to share our genes, especially relatives (who we tend to be
| kinder to). AI training is also a process that optimises
| for a goal, but unless having humans around helps that goal
| it wouldn't display any human empathy. In this case
| "selfishness" is just efficiency which a training process
| definitely selects for
|
| > I agree, but I feel like that's what these concerns about
| AI are doing, because that's what people do.
|
| I feel like they're doing a pretty good job at modelling AI
| as a theoretical agent, which does share some similarities
| with humans because humans are agents, but the main mistake
| people make is assuming their goals will be similar to
| humans because human values are somehow a universal truth
|
| > It also seems to me there is a huge gap between a super
| intelligent AI and the ability to have a perfect model of
| reality along with the ability to evaluate within that
| model the effect of every possible sequence of packets sent
| out to the internet.
|
| That's very true, it's an unrealistic thought experiment,
| but it's a a good introduction to the concept that
| something significantly more intelligent than us can be
| dangerous and pursue a goal with no regard to what we
| actually wanted
| dalmo3 wrote:
| I don't agree evolution optimises for a goal at all. IMO
| optimising for a goal means you first define a goal, then
| you work towards it.
|
| Evolution has no goal, it's simply a process determined
| by chemical reactions. Any goals we attribute to it, e.g.
| "for our genes to survive and be passed on" are emergent
| phenomena, a rationalisation after the fact that that is
| indeed what's been observed.
|
| It's plausible that AI "goals" emerge evolutionarily as
| well, but for that to happen we first need to create not
| AGI but Artificial Life, which is a huge leap from today,
| and I certainly don't understand how that's inevitable.
| circuit10 wrote:
| Then by that definition AI training has no goal, it's
| simply a process defined by calculations. But whether you
| want it call it a goal or not, the fact remains that they
| look very, very much like goals. "If it looks like a
| duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it
| probably is a duck."
|
| > It's plausible that AI "goals" emerge evolutionarily as
| well
|
| AI training is vaguely similar to evolution, except more
| efficient and directed
| dalmo3 wrote:
| > Then by that definition AI training has no goal, it's
| simply a process defined by calculations.
|
| No, the very definition of training is that there is a
| goal which to train for. Those calculations were created
| by humans with goals. For LLMs, the goal is token
| prediction.
|
| Evolution has no training.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| What is the training goal of ChatGPT ?
| dalmo3 wrote:
| > ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is
| trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide
| a detailed response.
|
| https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
| patch_cable wrote:
| > but it's a a good introduction to the concept that
| something significantly more intelligent than us can be
| dangerous and pursue a goal with no regard to what we
| actually wanted
|
| I think thing significantly less intelligent can do this
| too. See any computer program that went wrong. I don't
| think that is a novel idea.
|
| Perhaps it is a lack of imagination on my part, but I
| can't help but think, in this stamp collector example,
| someone would just be like "wait why are these machines
| going crazy printing stamps" and just like turn them off.
|
| I feel like any argument on the dangers of
| superintelligent AI rests on the belief it can also use
| that intelligence to manipulate humans to complete any
| task and/or hack into any computer system.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I think you underestimate just how careful "real" businesses
| are when it comes to violating the (copyright) law. Any legal
| advisor at any corp will strongly advice against using code
| that's generated like this, until there is clear legal
| precedent that it's OK to do this.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Doesn't Microsoft already use Copilot internally?
| robocat wrote:
| Of course if only used on internal software that isn't
| distributed, then copying GPL code is fine. Until a
| developer inadvertently distributes it or copies code from
| one place to another...
| sublimefire wrote:
| Yep they do, but I did not see anyone generating chunks of
| gpl'd .NET code yet.
| pc86 wrote:
| Microsoft puts out a _lot_ of non-.NET code, including
| internally.
| sroussey wrote:
| True, and that will cause a departure between companies large
| enough to worry, and all the startups that don't.
| hnfong wrote:
| Does that involve a ban of stackoverflow use as well?
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
|
| I don't think I've heard anyone warn people not to copy code
| snippets from stackoverflow due to licensing issues, although
| "real" businesses should be rightfully concerned.
| gkbrk wrote:
| It's already a common practice to put a StackOverflow link
| as a comment when you copy code from them. It provides
| valuable context to future readers.
|
| That's probably enough for attribution, but I suppose one
| could copy the author name as well.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I think you underestimate how easy it is for developers to
| disregard what the Corp lawyer said about AI code gen tools.
|
| Manager: "we asked, legal says you can't use copilot", dev:
| "okay, so from now on, I'll not discuss how I use copilot and
| will remember to disable it when someone sees me working,
| gotcha".
|
| I'm not saying everyone will do this, I'm saying some people
| will know that the corp doesn't always have a way to verify
| how the code was written, and they will think that a lawsuit
| cannot really happen to them.
| Filligree wrote:
| > Manager: "we asked, legal says you can't use copilot",
| dev: "okay, so from now on, I'll not discuss how I use
| copilot and will remember to disable it when someone sees
| me working, gotcha".
|
| Manager: "Everyone else is running through their feature
| list faster than you. What gives? Remember, you're not
| allowed to use Copilot."
|
| IC: "I'm not using Copilot."
|
| Manager: "Remember, you're not allowed to use Copilot."
| gumballindie wrote:
| > The makers of these models and products will talk about those
| non-problems to cover for the fact that they're vacuuming up
| the work of individuals then monetizing it for the profit of
| big industry players.
|
| Also why they claim these are "black boxes" and that they
| "don't understand how they work". They are prepping the markets
| for the grand theft that's unfolding.
| codexb wrote:
| AI will just make non-permissive open source licenses more
| pointless than they already are. The GPL and similar licenses
| have been on a slow death march for over a decade. AI isn't
| doing anything that Human Intelligence isn't already doing.
| Every single developer has looked at non-permissive open source
| code for inspiration.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Yup. gg, gpl
| bioemerl wrote:
| It was already more than possible to just copy stuff, a court
| is not going to recognize a very convoluted way to copy stuff I
| don't believe.
|
| The same thing is preventing intentional use of AI tools if you
| copy as is preventing regular copying, the willingness of the
| owner to sue.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| I don't think this theory holds up. Singularity concerns long
| predate LLMs and are mostly expressed by people who want OpenAI
| to stop what they're doing right now. Sam Altman has publically
| disagreed with AI doomers. If you're willing to believe that
| OpenAI is pretending not to be concerned but is quietly hyping
| the concerns up, I have to wonder what standard of evidence is
| letting you simultaneously write off the concerns as bullshit.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > what standard of evidence is letting you simultaneously
| write off the concerns as bullshit.
|
| Negative marketing is good marketing. Look at all of us
| debating this scale theft promoting the brand of this non
| product.
| quasarsunnix wrote:
| I think cattown might be referring to statements such as
| this:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/17/openai-
| sa...
|
| Not sure if I'd say there's a conspiracy per se, but I do
| think generative AI players are going to be careful about the
| optics of the technology and how it works. Anecdotally from
| speaking to non-technical family members there's very little
| understanding for how the technology actually works, and it
| seems there's not a great deal of effort to emphasize the
| importance of training data, or the intellectual property
| considerations in these companies marketing materials.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| For me personally it's that everyone who is expressing these
| concerns has clearly done less critical thinking about the
| subject than your average extremely high teenager. When you
| ask them about details they get defensive, resort to even
| stranger ground like "Well a human is nothing more than an
| autocomplete" (clearly not true).
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't believe that rogue AIs are a threat for the next
| few years, but the claim that the likes of Geoffrey Hinton
| have done less thinking about the subject "than your
| average extremely high teenager" is absurd.
| ok_dad wrote:
| The fear I have isn't an AI doing things by itself, but
| being good enough so that if Joe Evil gets his hands on
| the AI, he can single-handedly (with AI help) break into
| secure databases, or something.
|
| You know how a lot of us on HN talk about how security is
| just a latent concern for companies, but luckily there
| aren't enough hackers to take advantage of the massive
| number of bugs in every bit of code ever written? Well, a
| future powerful coding AI running on second-hand Etherium
| mining rigs in some extremist's basement in Chicago can
| probably do a lot more damage than a handful of state
| sponsored hackers in Russian and North Korea!
| lhl wrote:
| It seems to me, from a copyright perspective, all commercial
| use of generative AI depends on whether the output is
| transformative fair use (vs derived work). While the courts
| will have its say, ultimately whether new rules are carved out
| or not is going to be again (as all copyright law is) based on
| commercial interests - I have the feeling that the potential
| productivity upside across all industries (and in terms of
| national interests) is going to be big enough that it'll work
| itself out largely in the favor of generative AI.
|
| That being said, IMO, that's completely separate from the
| safety issues (that exist now and won't go away even if
| somehow, all commercial use is banned):
|
| Urbina, Fabio, Filippa Lentzos, Cedric Invernizzi, and Sean
| Ekins. "Dual Use of Artificial-Intelligence-Powered Drug
| Discovery." Nature Machine Intelligence 4, no. 3 (March 2022):
| 189-91. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9.
|
| Bilika, Domna, Nikoletta Michopoulou, Efthimios Alepis, and
| Constantinos Patsakis. "Hello Me, Meet the Real Me: Audio
| Deepfake Attacks on Voice Assistants." arXiv, February 20,
| 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10328
|
| Mirsky, Yisroel, Ambra Demontis, Jaidip Kotak, Ram Shankar,
| Deng Gelei, Liu Yang, Xiangyu Zhang, Wenke Lee, Yuval Elovici,
| and Battista Biggio. "The Threat of Offensive AI to
| Organizations." arXiv, June 29, 2021.
| http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15764.
|
| I don't think most people have thought through all the ways
| perfect text, image, voice, and soon video
| generation/replication will upend society, or all the ways that
| the LLMs will be abused...
|
| As for AGI xrisk. I've done some reading, and since we don't
| know the limits of the current AI paradigm, and we don't know
| how to actually align an AGI, I think now is a perfectly
| cromulent time to be thinking about it. Based on my reading, I
| think the people ringing alarm bells are right to be worried. I
| don't think anyone giving this serious thought is being
| mendacious.
|
| Bowman, Samuel R. "Eight Things to Know about Large Language
| Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.00612 (2023).
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00612.
|
| Ngo, Richard, Lawrence Chan, and Soren Mindermann. "The
| Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspective." arXiv,
| February 22, 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626.
|
| Carlsmith, Joseph. "Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?"
| arXiv, June 16, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353.
|
| I think Ian Hogarth's recent FT article
| https://archive.is/NdrNo is the best summary of where we are
| why we might be in trouble, for those that don't care for arXiv
| papers.
| visarga wrote:
| > then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players
|
| Looks like LLMs are universally useful for individual people
| and companies, monetisation of LLMs is only incipient, and free
| models are starting to pop up. So you don't need to use paid
| APIs except for more difficult tasks.
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| i recommend the Jollo LNT license for all your pointless
| theatrical "copyright" needs. it does not use swear words, unlike
| "WTFPL", and is even more ambiguous. ive tried submitting it to
| the FSF before for review, but they were confused by it
| http://jollo.org/LNT/doc/licensing
| smegsicle wrote:
| one potentially major issue is that it seems to be written in
| some dialect of gibberish
| jwilk wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25807559
| microtherion wrote:
| Anglo-American legal writing often relies on French terms of
| art, but I don't think this license is quite applying the
| idea properly.
| masukomi wrote:
| to any Codeium dev / management reading this:
|
| You have completely missed the point. We still need to know the
| applicable licenses of the code it is emitting even the ones that
| aren't GPL. Furthermore GPL people don't want they code to not be
| used. They want it to be used _within the terms of the license_.
| I distribute MIT and GPL code in my repos, BOTH should have their
| license terms honored.
|
| MIT licensed code still needs to be correctly attributed, just
| like GPL.
|
| I don't care what license the code is that's emitted, as long as
| the licenses are included. It'd be nice to be able to choose to
| only emit code trained on particular licenses but I get that
| that's not easy.
| mhandley wrote:
| Given how cautious corporate lawyers usually are, I'm surprised
| any company allows the use of AI for code generation. The USPTO
| has been pretty clear that AI generated material is not
| copyrightable, as to qualify for copyright a work has to be the
| creative act of a human. So any company allowing AI to generate
| code runs the risk of not owning the copyright on it.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Does _Microsoft_ allow Copilot use on their products? Can
| MSOffice or Azure or Windows developers use Copilot to write
| code?
|
| I've been waiting to find that out before I go anywhere near
| this kind of thing.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I'm not sure if this has ever been stated publically but it
| is my understanding that MSFT dogfooded copilot a lot just
| before/after the launch. I'm not sure if they are doing this
| still, but I don't see why they would have stopped.
| belval wrote:
| Not Microsoft and not Copilot, but Amazon is encouraging us
| to use CodeWhisperer at work. That being said I don't think
| the CodeWhisperer model was trained on non-permissive data so
| maybe that's why.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/faqs/
| JohnFen wrote:
| Where does the FAQ say that? I see that it says it was
| trained, in part, on open source code. That's pretty vague
| in terms of determining permission.
| belval wrote:
| That's why I said "I think", it's not really clear. That
| being said:
|
| > Will CodeWhisperer produce code that looks similar to
| its training data
|
| > If CodeWhisperer detects that its output matches
| particular open-source training data, the built-in
| reference tracker will notify you with a reference to the
| license type (for example, MIT or Apache) and a URL for
| the open-source project.
|
| They seem to at least have some protections in place to
| prevent CodeWhisperer from spitting out existing code
| without attribution as shown in the Twitter thread. They
| also only mention MIT and Apache.
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| Bigger question is whether Microsoft used all of their
| internal code to help train. If not is is a good indication
| of trust
| smegsicle wrote:
| last i heard was no, they did not include their own code in
| the training set
| blibble wrote:
| would anyone pay for a product trained on the Microsoft
| Teams and Sharepoint codebases?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| That would be handy for the ReactOS guys if they did.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is a common misunderstanding of the recent guidance[0]
| that ignores substantial portions of it.
|
| The Copyright Office was pretty clear that works that
| incorporate AI-generated content _can_ be copyrighted if there
| is sufficient human input. If there _isn 't_ substantial human
| input in judiciously curating and integrating AI-generated
| code, the company has bigger problems than copyright.
|
| Here's the most relevant quotation from the guidance clarifying
| when AI-assisted works can be copyrighted:
|
| > In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated
| material will also contain sufficient human authorship to
| support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or
| arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way
| that "the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original
| work of authorship." [33] Or an artist may modify material
| originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the
| modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.[34]
| In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored
| aspects of the work, which are "independent of" and do "not
| affect" the copyright status of the AI-generated material
| itself.[35]
|
| > This policy does not mean that technological tools cannot be
| part of the creative process. Authors have long used such tools
| to create their works or to recast, transform, or adapt their
| expressive authorship. For example, a visual artist who uses
| Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the
| modified image,[36] and a musical artist may use effects such
| as guitar pedals when creating a sound recording. In each case,
| what matters is the extent to which the human had creative
| control over the work's expression and "actually formed" the
| traditional elements of authorship.[37]
|
| [0]
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...
| gumballindie wrote:
| At some point we're going to have to test this - can we go work
| for a company and if their workers write code with the help of
| ai can we just use the code for ourselves as well? Since it's
| not copyright-able.
| hgsgm wrote:
| No, because PP completely mischaracterized what USPTO said.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Is there any practical difference between owning the copyright
| on a badly defined ~30% of a codebase and 100% of the codebase?
| In either case, no sane company is going to buy the code if one
| of your employees tries to leak it to them, which I assume is
| your concern.
| mhandley wrote:
| Scene, a courtroom, 2026:
|
| "So Mr Zim, you're accusing X of using your copyrighted code.
| But you've admitted you used AI to generate that codebase, so
| you don't own the copyright. Please prove exactly which lines
| of code you do own the copyright to?"
| hgsgm wrote:
| "I prompted and edited the AI code"
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Depending on what logs exist I could probably find lines of
| code which definitely aren't AI generated. Of course, in
| practice I wouldn't bother and would sue using trade secret
| laws instead where no such issue exists.
| hgsgm wrote:
| "Under the new rule, _though applicants may claim a copyright
| for an arrangement or editing_ of such material, the original
| work is ineligible "
| mtkd wrote:
| Makes you wonder how many public repos you would need to seed
| with a carefully crafted attack/weakness in a common
| feature/pattern to start effectively poisoning codebases that are
| leaning on copilot
| umvi wrote:
| Human brains emit GPL code too (probably) if you've looked at
| enough of it. Heck, some humans intentionally study GPL code and
| then rewrite it with a slightly different implementation to get
| around the license.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >researchers say LLMs rarely spit out training data verbatim
| unless interacted with adversarially, but theoretically, they
| could.
|
| Theoretically they can generate any arbitrary snippet of code (if
| it correctly fits the distribution), regardless of whether or not
| the code was in the training dataset.
| gumballindie wrote:
| They all do. The Great Heist is ongoing and it would appear
| without an end in sight.
| jrockway wrote:
| As long as the AI doesn't produce this function, you're fine:
| private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int
| toIndex { if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw
| new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
| ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")"); if (fromIndex < 0)
| throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
| if (toIndex > arrayLen) throw new
| ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex); }
|
| On a more serious note, I really wonder where the line is drawn
| for copyright. I see a lot of people claiming that AI is
| producing code they've written verbatim, but sometimes I wonder
| if everyone just writes certain things the same way. For the
| above rangeCheck function, there isn't much opportunity for the
| individual programmer to be creative. Perhaps there is a matter
| of taste on what exceptions you throw, or in what order. But the
| chosen ones are certainly what most people think of first, and
| the order to validate arguments, then check the low value, then
| check the high value, is pretty much what anyone would do.
| Perhaps you could format the error message differently. That's
| about it. So when someone "rips off" your code wholesale, it's
| could just be that _everyone_ writing that function would have
| typed in the exact same bytes as you. You know your style guide
| is working when you look at code, think you wrote it, but
| actually you didn 't!
| zvolsky wrote:
| This "think you wrote, but actually you didn't!", sometimes
| with another "actually you did, but you are looking at the code
| of someone who wrote it the same" happens often with people who
| have similar taste for solving problems. Or whose taste is
| influenced by the same teachers, such as you, jrockway! I've
| been using your open source as as one of my references for Go
| style. Thank you for sharing your opinionated-server, jsso2,
| and other projects, under the Apache 2.0 license!
| m_0x wrote:
| Why? Why is that function special?
| csmattryder wrote:
| Oracle's lawyers said they owned the rights to it, Google
| disagreed. Google was right, legally.
|
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > I see a lot of people claiming that AI is producing code
| they've written verbatim, but sometimes I wonder if everyone
| just writes certain things the same way. For the above
| rangeCheck function, there isn't much opportunity for the
| individual programmer to be creative.
|
| This point is absolutely going to come up in any lawsuits;
| because the law does sometimes examine how much creativity
| there is available in a field before making a determination
| (Oracle v Google comes to mind). If you can show that there are
| very, very few reasonable ways to accomplish a goal, and said
| goal is otherwise not patented or prohibited, it's either not
| copyrightable or Fair Use, take your pick.
|
| This even applies under the interoperability section of the
| DMCA and similar laws for huge projects. Assuming that ReactOS,
| for example, is actually completely clean-room; that would be
| protected despite having the same API names and, likely, a lot
| of similar code implementing most of the most basic APIs.
| asddubs wrote:
| the code is a reference to oracle v google
| shagie wrote:
| Incidentally this code _doesn 't_ have any license attached
| to it. So if an LLM happened to produce this code and
| Oracle said "where did you get that?! did you illicitly
| include the Java code base as part of your training data?"
| the organization that got the data for the LLM training can
| say "no, we used Hacker News comments and this code
| happened to have been in there verbatim... sorry."
|
| License successfully laundered!
| asddubs wrote:
| that would work if no license didn't mean all rights
| reserved by default
| shagie wrote:
| The question isn't what is the license but rather the
| location that the code was used as part of a data set.
|
| I could just as easily point to
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/13910492 which is on a page
| that is CC licensed.
| amelius wrote:
| Or anything from Numerical Recipes in C.
| sp332 wrote:
| The way copyright works, it's a violation if it was _copied_ ,
| but it's fine if it was generated independently. In this case I
| would say it's a copy, but I'm sure someone else would argue
| differently.
| makk wrote:
| IANAL but I work alongside them. Here's an argument I've
| heard.
|
| You can read the data to train a thing. So long as that thing
| doesn't literally copy the data into itself then the training
| hasn't violated copyright.
|
| When that thing later generates an output, the output isn't
| copyrightable because it's machine generated (this is the
| current US position) and it isn't a copyright violation
| because it was generated, not copied.
|
| You can launder copyrighted material through an LLM,
| basically.
| contravariant wrote:
| > So long as that thing doesn't literally copy the data
| into itself then the training hasn't violated copyright.
|
| Could luck proving that hasn't happened. If a language
| model that can reproduce the code verbatim doesn't count
| then a movie re-encoded into a different format shouldn't
| count either.
| prepend wrote:
| The movie re-encoded into a different format is perfectly
| fine if the work is sufficiently different.
|
| Taking a file of wolf of Wall Street and encoding it so
| all the oranges are blue but there's no other changes is
| bad as that's clearly a derived work.
|
| Taking the same file and scrambling it so it doesn't
| resemble is perfectly fine.
|
| Watching the movie and then making your own version of
| the same exact plot points is infringement. But using
| plot points that are changed is perfectly fine.
|
| There's existing copyright law that prevents the makers
| of the movie Deep Impact from suing the makers of
| Armageddon.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I _think_ it's unproven either ways. Courts ignore
| definition wars so long both party ignores it too. If you
| sued me for stealing some cheese, the justice system
| won't care if it actually had been cheese or what
| actually cheese is so long I stick to such insistence
| that I didn't do anything wrong up to your accusation.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Which, by the way, this is completely untested in courts.
|
| Courts have decided, after a bunch of case-by-case
| decisions, that sampling a song consitutes creating a
| derivitive work, and you must obtain a license from a
| copyright holder to do so.
|
| It is my opinion that training a model copies and creates
| derivitive work on what you used to train it, so you must
| have a license to train LLMs on content. I am not a lawyer,
| I am no one, my opinion here is worthless.
|
| We already know that you can create a copy of something
| without doing a bit-for-bit duplicate because a) copyright
| law existed before we had _bits_ , and b) transcoding a
| movie still counts as creating a copy. Recording my own VHS
| of HBO and selling it is still illegal.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > You can launder copyrighted material through an LLM,
| basically.
|
| Good!
| shagie wrote:
| We've been laundering licenses on code on Stack Overflow
| and the rest of the SE network (whatever to CC (which can
| then be GPL'ed)) for a decade now.
|
| Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ques
| tions/2695...
|
| The source code is GPL'ed, but that page is CC BY-SA 3.0.
|
| It's also fairly easy to assume that a fair bit of material
| on SO that was copied from employer's codebases into SO
| (and thus now CC) can be included in GPL code now too.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Most generative AI actually does have significant problems
| with the model copying the data into itself. Not literally
| - there isn't a bunch of model parameters that line up to
| the exact PNG bitstream of particular images. But courts
| wouldn't care as long as the model outputs something that
| looks "close enough", because the chain of provenance is
| clearly established from the training set, through gradient
| descent and the model weights, into the final output.
|
| There's a paper from Google and Princeton about
| regurgitation happening in Stable Diffusion and Imagen:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.13188.pdf
|
| OpenAI also had to spend a bunch of time on deduplicating
| an insanely large dataset to prevent this from happening in
| DALL-E: https://openai.com/research/dall-e-2-pre-training-
| mitigation...
|
| I have no clue how they handled this in GPT-3 or -4. Given
| the amount of regurgitation found in Copilot I imagine
| there's lots of significant code fragments floating about
| nominally different projects that a deduplicator wouldn't
| match as identical.
| layer8 wrote:
| Copyright is limited to works that meet a certain threshold of
| originality [0]. It is assumed that works meeting such a
| threshold won't be replicated by mere coincidence.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
| numlock86 wrote:
| > but sometimes I wonder if everyone just writes certain things
| the same way
|
| > For the above rangeCheck function, there isn't much
| opportunity for the individual programmer to be creative.
|
| We are at a point at which compilers detect such functions and
| replace them with highly optimized ones. If you have to
| artificially change just for the sake of patent or license
| trolls you don't just get more work but also worse
| performance/optimizations in most cases.
| jrm4 wrote:
| They do not. This is pretty easily provable. I was in a CS
| class that had an automated plagiarism checker over 20 years
| ago.
|
| (And since Brian Kernighan was teaching it, I'm inclined to
| believe in it.)
| 15155 wrote:
| The trick with these:
|
| 1) They are using your IP with coerced consent in the future
| to check other people's work as well as your own in the
| future. (Let's have a fun discussion about "self-plagiarism."
|
| 2) ChatGPT and the like are going to so massively increase
| the noise floor on this problem space that these counterfeit
| detection companies should all but disappear in a number of
| years.
| rcme wrote:
| Did it notify you automatically if you had plagiarized
| something, or did it flag you internally for manual review?
| jacquesm wrote:
| As a datapoint: I once successfully fielded a copyright case on
| about 15 lines of code.
| hgsgm wrote:
| What does "fielded" mean?
| pyth0 wrote:
| Likely a typo. "fielded" -> "filed"
| antonvs wrote:
| "Successfully filed" means nothing though. Anyone can
| file anything. The question is whether the case was won.
| neogodless wrote:
| I've only heard it used in reference to questions but I
| think it's being stretched slightly here to just mean
| "dealt with" or "handled".
| avbanks wrote:
| You could probably do that w/ 1 line of code depending on the
| variable name :)
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I wouldn't worry about this code. It wouldn't compile anyways.
| lol
|
| Syntax Error on line 1. Missing closing ) in the method
| definition.
| tehsauce wrote:
| In the example from the article, copilot produces identical
| comments, not just a functionally identical implementation. So
| in this case your hypothesis is false. But thanks for trying to
| stand up against the open source community for microsoft. /s
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I don't understand why people have become so accepting. "Oh
| they've stolen all the public code and not provided
| attribution then sold it for a profit, can we just give these
| poor evil companies a break? It's just progress...".
|
| This is completely unacceptable and another example that
| Microsoft is an evil and amoral company who only cares about
| open source for financial gain.
| breck wrote:
| > On a more serious note, I really wonder where the line is
| drawn for copyright.
|
| As soon as you start thinking about copyright, you end up
| realizing it's all non-sense. Stephan Kinsella (a patent
| lawyer!) is the leading thinker on this, and his videos,
| essays, and podcasts are worth listening to:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0RXfGGMGPE
| humanistbot wrote:
| That's why copyright holders for reference works have been
| using copyright traps for ages. That's where you include a
| fictional town in a map, a nonsense word in a dictionary, or a
| fake person in your phone book. If your competitors reproduce
| the trap, then that's clear evidence you can use in court.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_trap
| iudqnolq wrote:
| If you look at the Legal Action section of your link you'll
| see the line "However, the case was dismissed" quite a few
| times. That's because data isn't copyrightable.
|
| Edit: As sroussey points out s/isn't copyrightable/isn't
| copyrightable in the USA
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The other problem with these "copyright traps" is that they
| do nothing to prove someone copied the _legitimate_ parts
| of the data.
|
| Suppose you recreate the entire dataset from scratch. Then
| someone notices (e.g. using an automated comparison) that
| the "trap" is in the other dataset but missing from yours,
| and submits it to you to add.
|
| This is arguably too small an addition to be copyrighted on
| its own, but regardless of that, it would then be all you
| have to remove to get back to a clean version. And since
| it's erroneous data, you would want to remove it anyway.
| plasticchris wrote:
| My favorite of these was a town founded to match the map.
| Pretty sure I heard an npr story on it.
| sroussey wrote:
| Not in the USA, but it is in the EU and elsewhere.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| How do you define the geolocation of data?
|
| If my website is hosted in EU but a company scans it from
| the internet in the US, how could they possibly know it
| is hosted in EU?
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Which country's laws apply and what remedies you can get
| if they were violated is far more complicated than
| geolocation of data.
|
| But very broadly speaking you would need to sue in an EU
| court to enforce EU law. And you could sue a US company
| in specific EU country's court if the company had more
| than some minimum level of connection to the that
| country. The country the data is hosted in isn't key,
| though it can be evidence of connection to that country.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Where the data is stored does not matter much. Laws deal
| with people and companies, so it matters where you live
| or where your company operates. So if you live in the US
| you don't have to worry about EU laws unless you do
| buisness in EU.
| concordDance wrote:
| Hence why you should live on that unclaimed but of land
| in Africa. :D
| jprete wrote:
| The relevant line is "information alone without a minimum
| of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright".
|
| There is definitely creativity in writing code; it's not a
| completely deterministic translation of even a complete
| specification.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Oh absolutely. I was speaking only about the comment I
| replied to.
| ljm wrote:
| I first saw this in action on StackOverflow when, during an
| interview, a candidate copy-pasted a solution verbatim
| _including_ the attribution. Didn 't even give it a second
| thought, like they didn't even read the code or what it was
| doing.
|
| It wasn't the right solution to the problem in question, for
| what it's worth.
|
| Just manually did what GPT does now.
| cxr wrote:
| It's occasionally explained--but still not widely understood,
| I'd wager--that this is the reason why so much GNU code is
| hard to follow.
|
| In the US legal system the merger doctrine is a concept
| whereby a given expression cannot be granted protection if
| it's not sufficiently creative--and there only so many ways
| to express something when stripped down to its fundamentals.
| In response to this, RMS and Moglen encouraged contributors
| from very early on to try to express the inner workings of
| GNU utilities in creative and non-obvious ways out of caution
| against the possibility that the copyleft obligations of the
| GPL wrt a given package could be nullified by a finding in
| court that it did not pass the threshold for creativity.
| noirscape wrote:
| GNU code is partially hard to follow because of RMS
| paranoia, but that mostly manifests itself in the code
| being weirdly structured. The far bigger reason is that GNU
| code tends to run with really strange optimizations and
| project decisions since they want their tools to be able to
| run on ancient mainframes that practically nobody uses
| anymore, so everything is overoptimized for that.
| tedivm wrote:
| We don't need the copyright traps here though as Github
| openly admits to using the public code for training. They
| just don't care that they're essentially license laundering
| code since they can make money doing it.
|
| That said we used copyright traps at Malwarebytes, which is
| how we found out that iobit was stealing our database.
| [deleted]
| concordDance wrote:
| Using for training doesn't mean its reproduced.
|
| Consider a junior dev who writes a range check function
| while working for a company (so they own the copyright)
| then goes to a different company and writes the same range
| function because that's just how he writes code.
|
| Has copyright been infringed?
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| That programmer definitely reproduced the code, so if
| copilot does the same that's definitely reproduction.
|
| Then the legalities can be argued, but an individual is
| in any case not remotely comparable to a service like
| copilot.
| seadan83 wrote:
| > Then the legalities can be argued, but an individual is
| in any case not remotely comparable to a service like
| copilot.
|
| Why is this? Copilot in some ways is an automated way to
| search code & stack overflow. There is a very annoying
| website that does nothing more than show relevant code
| samples of various google search terms.
|
| If the manual version of something is okay (eg: googling
| for code, finding it, fitting for a new and specific
| purpose that is similar), why would an automated version
| of that be any different?
| okamiueru wrote:
| Because of the license the code is under?
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| For a similar reason that camera surveillance can be
| forbidden in places where people are still allowed to
| keep their eyes open.
|
| Or sending millions of messages in an automated way can
| be illegal but millions of people sending a message is
| not.
| belorn wrote:
| Playing a movie for a few friends who visits is fine, but
| start to demand tickets and suddenly it will look like a
| cinema which is not fine.
|
| The reason is always the same. Courts and judges will
| look at the situation and make a decision about what
| seems fair and what does not. It is them that need to be
| convinced that a specific use of a copyrighted work is
| permitted either through fair use or by a license.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| They have clean room implementation for just this
| problem.
|
| The _only_ escape clause is some random function that
| says how arbitrary a code block is. Or nontrivial.
|
| A person or AI can absolutely be violating copyright via
| your example.
| blibble wrote:
| > Has copyright been infringed?
|
| yes
|
| now if he had written a specification as to what the
| function should be, then passed it to someone else that
| had never seen the function and worked from the spec then
| he'd be ok
|
| see: IBM BIOS
| seadan83 wrote:
| As the copyright holder of "throw new", the Junior dev
| infringed my copyright! Let alone them infringing
| copyright of the company they crafted that code for.
|
| On a more serious note, there is a question whether
| algorithms and code blocks can be copyrighted, or if it
| is the _software_ that is copyrighted. Let's say I use
| websockets and you crib my usage of websockets for your
| own application. My opinion is that unless you rebuild
| the same thing I did, then "cribbing" is the long held
| art of "let me google how to do that". The artistic
| creation is the end software product, not really some
| measly embedded function that is boiler plate (form and
| function) for anything to work.
|
| The 'form and function' clause of copyright almost
| certainly makes a range check function not a copyright
| infringement.
| veec_cas_tant wrote:
| Easy money idea: when you know an employee will be
| leaving the company, have them spend their last weeks
| writing basic, foundational functions in multiple
| languages!
| stagger87 wrote:
| IANAL, but I do not think this is correct. "Clean room"
| implementation is a valid strategy to avoid this specific
| type of copyright concern. I'm aware of it because I've
| done it and worked with lawyers through the process.
| antonvs wrote:
| > yes
|
| It's not nearly that simple. No real copyright case is
| going to hinge on what a single range check function
| looks like.
|
| This is human law, it's not a programming situation where
| you can just apply some simple rule and get a
| deterministic answer. Context plays a huge part, among
| other things.
| blibble wrote:
| > No real copyright case is going to hinge on what a
| single range check function looks like.
|
| you realise this exact extremely famous function was the
| focus of a billion dollar supreme court copyright battle
| that went on for years?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_Americ
| a,_...
|
| (the entire basis of GPs joke)
| lallysingh wrote:
| Yup. They just copied manually.
| peytoncasper wrote:
| What happens if GitHub didn't use GPL licensed code, but
| still generated code that was identical to GPL licensed
| code?
| layer8 wrote:
| They'd have to prove to the court that the former is true
| despite the latter happening, which I imagine would be
| difficult to do in practice.
| tedivm wrote:
| We know that isn't the case because we can see code being
| reproduced even with comments, and Github has been open
| about the fact that they used everything they had in
| training.
|
| That said, lets say there's a new model that explicitly
| excluded closed source and copyleft licenses. Well, the
| MIT, MPL, Apache, BSD- they all say you can't strip their
| licensing off.
|
| Okay, so to get to the spirit of your question, lets say
| Github managed to program a model that worked using only
| their own code or code that was explicitly put in the
| public domain. If Github managed to reproduce code that
| wasn't in the training set, then it can't be accused of
| copying it. At that point the argument could be made that
| it independently created it.
|
| At the same time algorithms can't be copyrighted, but
| implementations of an algorithm can be, so if Github was
| basically just spitting out an algorithm that just
| happened to be implemented similarly to how some other
| code it wasn't trained on implemented it, then I would
| say there was no copyright violation.
| visarga wrote:
| How about rewording a code snippet so it doesn't exactly
| replicate the source, but is functionally identical?
| Could be applied before training. Can we say the LLM only
| learned the ideas not the expression? Copyright should
| protect expression and not restrict reusing ideas.
| janoc wrote:
| Except that's not how LLM works. LLM has no idea about
| "ideas", only probabilities of how certain words string
| together.
|
| So you literally can't make it produce functionally
| identical but not verbatim identical code. It doesn't
| understand that the two are equivalent.
|
| Also, such "functionally identical but not violating
| copyright" transformation is not possible to do, both
| given the complexity of the problem and the sheer volume
| of the data.
|
| And training it on some simplistically obfuscated code
| wouldn't help - all it would learn would be production of
| obfuscated code. Not useful for the intended use.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >We know that isn't the case because we can see code
| being reproduced even with comments
|
| If the comment is something like
|
| //check fromIndex is greater than toIndex
|
| then that is not any more individualistic or different
| than the actual function. Sadly, many people comment like
| this, on the other hand if it reproduced a comment with
| typos or something more complicated like
|
| /* this hack is because Firefox's implementation of SVG
| z-indexing does not match how Chrome or Safari does it -
| please read this article ...url...*/
|
| then yeah, then you would have something
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well yeah, we've already seen exactly this:
|
| https://twitter.com/StefanKarpinski/status/14109710611816
| 816...
| theRealMe wrote:
| In almost any other scenario this would be evidence. But
| Fast Inverse Square Root isn't some tightly held secret.
| That exact code, with those specific comments included,
| is found in the Wikipedia page for that algo:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, it's still GPL though.
| theRealMe wrote:
| True.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| OK that tracks as more than just lazy comments
| lookalikes.
| [deleted]
| rvba wrote:
| Did you read the article you are commenting on? It has
| examples.
| netfortius wrote:
| I think I mentioned this before, in another context: the
| solution is known as "honeytoken", and it is equally
| applicable in computer security.
| jschrf wrote:
| Also, re: maps, fake streets and cul-de-sacs that don't
| exist.
|
| I've set a "trap" myself years ago in code in a novel
| solution at the time for uploading photos from iOS non-
| interactively after the fact. It was to support disconnected
| field workers taking photos from iPhones/iPads, with the
| payloads uploaded at a later date.
|
| Chunked form data constructed in userland JS was the
| solution. Chunk separator was 17 dashes in a row (completely
| arbitrary), company name in 1337 speak, plus 17 more dashes.
|
| Found a competitor that had copied the code, changing only
| the 1337 speak part. 17 dashes remained on each side. Helped
| me realize that they had unminified and indeed ripped off our
| R&D work.
|
| Wonder if Copilot could be gamed the same way.
| peteradio wrote:
| How did you manage to find that your competitor copied your
| code?
| aetch wrote:
| Javascript
| z3t4 wrote:
| In most countries a copyright work need to be something
| substantial. You can not copyright single machine instructions.
| It needs to be a combination that is unique. And just the
| instructions are not copyrightable, you cant for example
| copyright a recepy. But you can copyright a book of recepies.
| So if you make a program with many instructions put togheter
| you automatically get copyright. And if someone steals parts of
| your code it will be difficult to claim the copyright if those
| parts are used to create a new program. But if the new program
| is based on your program, for example a fork, or most of the
| code comes from your program its derative work.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I believe there are couple different aspects to "it's AI
| training legal same as human" argument:
|
| 1. Copyright is only granted to creative elements; lots of
| program codes are supposedly un-copyrightable, though no one
| wants to fight on that ground.
|
| 2. It is lawful in many jurisdictions to effectively steal and
| train AI with even copyrighted materials, for the sake of
| humanity at large; same supposedly not apply to the output. But
| AI-supportive clusters tends to conflate between the two.
|
| 3. AI training processes, stochastic gradient descent and all,
| are only called "learning" and/or "training" by convention;
| there is no public consent that it is same as how the word is
| supposedly defined, though we generally don't scare quote
| airplanes flying.
| [deleted]
| rvnx wrote:
| In the big picture, if we enter a world where an AI is
| instantly capable of doing code better than you do and without
| efforts, then I'm not sure why code should be copyrightable at
| all.
|
| Copyright protects original works of authorship including
| literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as
| poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and
| architecture.
|
| Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of
| operation, although it may protect the way these things are
| expressed.
|
| Here (and in the future even more), AI is totally capable of
| expressing one idea in any programming language if you ask for
| it (even if conceptually inspired by copyrighted code).
|
| Which means that a particular expression (a specific
| implementation) is practically of no value or particular
| interest at this stage.
|
| You could ask the AI to do a slightly different implementation,
| it would not be a problem for it and would require no efforts.
|
| There is no point to protect something that can be generated
| using no effort and has no particular genius in it.
| DanHulton wrote:
| We don't need to enter a world where AI gets any better at
| all to be able to argue that software shouldn't be
| copyrightable, smart people have been doing that for ages.
|
| The problem, however, is that we live in this world, where it
| is copyrightable, and componies relying on Copilot to do
| large swathes of code generation do potentially have to worry
| about including copyrighted code in their codebase, and what
| the legal fallout from that might be.
| Longlius wrote:
| It also creates a world where developers who have created
| code and specifically protected it with copyleft licenses
| to ensure that derivative works always remain a public good
| are having their rights laundered away via LLMs. I fully
| expect the FOSS community to fold if their rights are not
| respected and it could lead to a software dark age.
| blibble wrote:
| > I fully expect the FOSS community to fold if their
| rights are not respected and it could lead to a software
| dark age.
|
| just happens to be a coincidence this was all initiated
| by Microsoft?
| bakugo wrote:
| How many times are we going to go through this before we accept
| that nobody involved in generative AI cares about pesky things
| like licenses and copyright?
|
| One of the main reasons corporations love it so much is because
| it effectively lets them profit off of the work of others with no
| consequences.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Seriously, let's get back good old honest model of paying
| outsourced indian programmers $2.50 an hour to retype GPL code
| or copy and paste it from Stack Overflow into our codebase.
| goodpoint wrote:
| The title is true, but the claim that coedium is not violating
| licenses is false.
|
| Many licenses still require attribution and Coedium is violating
| them.
| abigail95 wrote:
| Did the accept the license terms or are they using it under
| fair use?
| epylar wrote:
| The crux of this is at what point is the code being copied, and
| is that copying allowed under the license? For example, maybe
| --
|
| * Training an AI with the code is allowed legally.
|
| * Storing model weights is allowed legally.
|
| * Querying the AI with those model weights is allowed legally.
|
| Or maybe not.
| challengedchip wrote:
| It seems like a stretch to argue that the model isn't "a work
| based on" GPL code when that GPL code is an input to a
| deterministic algorithm from which the model is produced. So,
| my bet is on point #1.
|
| The only ambiguity as far as I can tell is GPL covers "source
| code", "machine-readable Corresponding Source", and "object
| code form", and it's not explicit whether vector-fields count
| as any of those things. I doubt anyone would seriously argue
| that zipping and then un-zipping some GPL source code means
| you don't need to respect the original license. LLMs are
| different in that they're lossy compared to the zip format -
| does the nature of this lossiness invalidate the intent of
| the GPL's original language? I doubt it.
| ognarb wrote:
| Also I wonder how this will hold with certain technology. For
| example apps written with Qt or GPL are very likely to be GPL
| licensed, unlike apps written in JavaScript which are often
| licensed under MIT. The likeness of copilot/chatgpt splitting gpl
| licensed code is the quite higher in Qt/GTK projects...
| hgsgm wrote:
| LLMs still violate MIT license's attribution requirement
| abigail95 wrote:
| You are allowed to read others code to learn from it,
| regardless of any license being accepted offered or rejected.
| You must do so witin fair use, which is for a court to
| decide, based on individual case factors.
|
| Saying an LLM violates an atrribution requirement is a bad
| legal argument.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| These guys are trying so hard to smear Copilot. Similar blog post
| posted a few weeks ago with wild claims.
| noselasd wrote:
| How much if this is due to someone ripping off GPL code and
| stuffing it in a repo under a different license that got fed to
| copilot training?
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Maybe. But copilot also trains on the original gpl code with
| the gpl license intact so it doesn't matter.
| yafbum wrote:
| > non-permissive licenses such as GPL mean that you cannot [use
| the code] without consent.
|
| Huh? GPL does have strings attached, but if consent one of them?
|
| Seems like a thinly disguised ad
| user- wrote:
| Is Codeium just using openAI's api ? It seems to be just gpt3
| cheriot wrote:
| Code snippiets are not poems. I don't see how society benefits
| from granting an exclusive right to a few lines of C.
| hsjqllzlfkf wrote:
| Same way as society benefits from granting exclusive right to a
| few lines of poem...?
| cheriot wrote:
| A poem is an entire work. A 5 line snippet is one brick in a
| wall.
| prepend wrote:
| Why do people pay for Codium or Copilot when chatgpt does this
| for free?
| MangezBien wrote:
| I imagine because by paying for Copilot you offload some of
| your legal liability to github
| pyth0 wrote:
| Copilot currently has great plugin integrations for a number of
| editors and IDEs. I'm sure the same kind of tooling is in the
| works for ChatGPT but it's not as mature.
| [deleted]
| attah_ wrote:
| In other news: water is wet. What did they expect it to do, if
| not exactly this?
| [deleted]
| praveen9920 wrote:
| I believe there will be new "AI permissive licenses" that will
| pop up in near future. Or existing licenses to add a clause for
| training AI with their code.
| josefx wrote:
| But you need billions of lines to train an AI and most existing
| code can't just be re-licensed over night. So that would still
| kill all code related AI projects for the next decade if not
| longer.
| jcq3 wrote:
| I don't mind about anti violation licence value proposal, I want
| to know if it works better than gh copilot? As it is free so I
| could switch to it.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Even if you sample stuff from programs that use a permissive
| license, you still legally need to attribute that code. No
| attribution = copyright infringement. Can the AI code generator
| supply attribution for the specific works sampled?
| [deleted]
| naikrovek wrote:
| the article cites that 6mo tweet that everyone else cites. I
| don't think it is known if the user had public code suggestions
| turned off at the time, either; he wouldn't/didn't answer the
| question at the time.
|
| Also if I am remembering correctly, and I make no guarantee that
| I am, this tweet is from a person with a strong dislike for
| Microsoft, and if I am right about that, I would not put it past
| this person, or anyone else with a strong dislike of Microsoft,
| to craft a situation to make Microsoft look bad solely to hurt
| Microsoft.
|
| I've tried to make Copilot give me GPL code snippets while I have
| "suggestions matching public code" set to "blocked" and I can't
| make it happen.
|
| so _even if_ this was a problem 6 months ago, it would take some
| convincing to get me to believe that this happens today.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Does Codeium give attribution for code under other FOSS licenses?
| No?
|
| Still infringing.
|
| Nice try.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| When these articles were published, I was certain Microsoft had a
| plan to betray everyone's trust as they always do.
|
| Microsoft's business model is betrayal. Github is Microsoft.
|
| HNers got mad at people who pointed this out, and now here we
| are.
|
| You were warned, but you decided to believe again in the most
| vile people in the history of computing.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-06/github-is...
| rvz wrote:
| > When these articles were published, I was certain Microsoft
| had a plan to betray everyone's trust as they always do.
|
| They thrive on betrayal and will never change and are getting
| cleverer.
|
| > Microsoft's business model is betrayal. Github is Microsoft.
|
| OpenAI.com is also Microsoft.
|
| They were warned straight from the beginning [0] [1] and the
| same HNers keep falling for the Microsoft freebies and
| giveaways.
|
| Perhaps the time they will learn the hardest: _Is when it is
| too late._
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27772446
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28324999
| throwaway290 wrote:
| OpenAI is also pretty much Microsoft, hard to believe 10
| billions USD investment comes without enough strings attached
| to make them a puppet...
| blibble wrote:
| the github thing acquisition isn't really a big deal in terms
| of LLMs as they could have crawled github regardless of whether
| or not they owned it
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It is just the beginning.
| visarga wrote:
| Yeah, when you start with dozens of words replicating exactly a
| source file it is much easier to get a regurgitation. You can't
| prefix so deeply and then complain.
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