9 ms·

I'm really baffled by all this discussion on copyrights in the age of AI. The Copilot does not 'steal' or and reproduce our code - it simply LEARNS from it as a

• lawn 3y ago
  A human who learns to copy code letter for letter does just that: copies code. Same with an AI. The interesting debate should be what happens in the gray area, when you read a lot of code and learns patterns and ideas.
  • datavirtue 3y ago
    Code, is at best, a trade secret (it is also data). Keep it close to your chest, or don't.
• xxs 3y ago
  >it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it I thought that was a sarcastic remark, given the capitalization of 'learn', but followed by IMHO dispelled that part. We have no idea how humans learn, and the 'AI' has a statistical approach, not much more than that.
• bilqis 3y ago
  There is a difference between a person learning and a commercial product learning from someone else’s work, probably ignoring all the licenses.
  • adlpz 3y ago
    To be fair, when a programmer learns from publicly available but not public-domain code, and then applies the ideas, patterns, idioms and common implementations in their daily job as a software developer, the result is very much a "commercial product" (the dev company, the programmer themselves if a freelancer) learning from someone else's work and ignoring all the licenses. The only leap here is the fact that the programmer has outsourced the learning to a tool that does it for them, which they then use to do their job, just as before.
    • loveparade 3y ago
      No, the difference is that OpenAI has a huge competitive advantage due to direct partnership with Github, which is owned by Microsoft. In fact, it's even worse. With OpenAI making money from GPT, Github has even less incentive to make data easily available to others because that would allow for competition to come in. I wouldn't be surprised if Github starts locking down their APIs in the near future to prevent competitors from getting data for their models. Nobody is arguing against uploading code. It's about Github/Microsoft specifically.
      • adlpz 3y ago
        I agree there's a difference in the ease of access, a competitive advantage, sure. And I get that people writing public-source (however licensed) software don't want to make it easier for them (as in, Microsoft) to make money off of "learning" (of the machine type) from it. That's fair. However, at a first glance, it still feels to me like an unavoidable reality that if you publish source code it'll eventually be ingested by Copilot or whatever comes next. I mean, for the rest of the content all the new fancy LLMs have been trained with, there wasn't a Github equivalent. They just used massive scraped dumps of text from wherever they could find them, which most definitely included trillions of lines of very much copyrighted text. In short: not only I don't really see an issue with Copilot-like AIs learning from publicly available code (as I described in the GP comment) but I also think if you publish code anywhere at all it's inevitable that it'll end up in Copilot, regardless of where you host it. If you want to make it more expensive for Microsoft to scrape it, sure, go ahead, but I don't think it matters in the long run.
        • bamboozled 3y ago
          However, at a first glance, it still feels to me like an unavoidable reality that if you publish source code it'll eventually be ingested by Copilot or whatever comes next. I’d be quite careful with of this view. By your logic, it should be ok to take the Linux kernel, copy it, build it, then sell it and give nothing back to the community that built it. Then just blame it on the authors for uploading it to the internet ?
• eptcyka 3y ago
  Humans don't learn an algorithm by memorizing a particular implementation character by character.
  • golergka 3y ago
    And airplanes don't flap their wings, but we still agree that they're flying, just as birds do.
  • ignoramous 3y ago
    That's all the more reason for the utility of solutions like Copilot? Humans are limited in both time and memory. Though, GitHub would do well to also bake-in approp attributions if a significant portion of the generated code is a copypasta.
  • remix2000 3y ago
    Neither does copilot.
    • eptcyka 3y ago
      But it does though. There have been many times where this was the case.
      • Kiro 3y ago
        It only happens if you bait it really hard and push it into a corner. That's not representative at all. I use Copilot to write highly niched code that's based on my own repo. It's simply amazing at understanding the context and suggest things I was about to write anyway. Nothing it produces is just copypasted character by character. Not even close.
        • bamboozled 3y ago
          As others have pointed out, it means the model contains copyrighted material. So I guess that’s totally illegal. Like if I ripped a Windows ISO, zipped it up and shared it with half the world. You know what would happen to me don’t you ?
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  Humans are intentionally loading up giant sets of curated data for training, purposes, into a super computer to produce a model which is an black box and have provided zero attribution or credit to those who made this work possible. Humans are tuning these models to produce the results you see. In the case of ChatGPT-x, Open AI company which is disguised as a not for profit with a goal of producing ever more powerful models that may eventually be capable of replacing you at work while seemingly not having any plan to give back to those who’s work was used to make them insane amounts of money. They haven’t even given back any of their research. So it’s ok to take everyone’s open source work and not give back is it ? This isn’t some cute little robot who wakes up in the morning and decided it wants to be a coder. This is a multi-national company who has created the narrative you’re repeating. They know exactly what they’re doing.
• spuz 3y ago
  The problem is not that Copilot produces code that is "inspired" by GPL code, it's that it spits out GPL code verbatim. > This can lead to some copylefted code being included in proprietary or simply not copylefted projects. And this is a violation of both the license terms and the intellectual proprety of the authors of the original code. If the author was a human, this would be a clear violation of the licence. The AI case is no different as far as I can tell. Edit: I'm definitely no expert on copyright law for code but my personal rule is don't include someone's copyrighted code if it can by unambiguously identified as their original work. For very small lines of code, it would be hard to identify any single original author. When it comes to whole functions it gets easier to say "actually this came from this GPL licensed project". Since Copilot can produce whole functions verbatim, this is the basis on which I state that it "would be a clear violation" of the licence. If Copilot chooses to be less concerned about violating the law than I am then that's a problem. But maybe I'm overly cautious and the GPL is more lenient than this in reality.
  • ignoramous 3y ago
    > If the author was a human, this would be a clear violation of the licence. The AI case is no different as far as I can tell. We aren't talking verbatim generation of entire packages of code here, are we? Code snippets are surely covered under fair use?
    • logifail 3y ago
      > Code snippets are surely covered under fair use? ...for "purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports"? Sure. For a commercial product? Best check with your lawyer...
      • az226 3y ago
        Oracle would like to have a word..
    • afiori 3y ago
      It would almost surely be fair use to include a snippet of code from a different library in your (inline) documentation to argue that your code reimplements a bug for compatibility reasons. In general it is not fair use if you are using the material for the same scope as the original author[0] or if you are doing it just to namedrop/quote/omage the original. It is possible to argue that a snippet can be too small to be protected, but that would not be because of fair use. [0] Suppose that some Author B did as above and copied a snippet of code in their docstring to exlain buggy behaviour of a library they were reimplementing. If you are then trying to reimplement B's libary you can copy the same snippet B copied, but you likely cannot copy the paragraph written by B where they explain the how and the why of the bug.
• loveparade 3y ago
  A key difference is that a company is making a proprietary paid product out of the learnings from your code. This has nothing to do with open source. If the data could only used by other open source projects, e.g. open source AI models, I don't think anyone would complain. You could argue "well, but anyone can use the code on Github" and while that's technically true, it's obvious that with both Github and OpenAI being owned by Microsoft, OpenAI gets a huge competitive advantage due to internal partnerships.
  • toastal 3y ago
    Imagine if folks got royalties on commits, or the language model was required to be open as well.
• Aachen 3y ago
  Bit of a false equation to act as though a massive computer system is the same as any individual. People put code on github to be read by anyone (assuming a public repository), but the terms of use are governed by the license. Now you've got a system that ignores the license and scrapes your data for its own purpose. You can pretend it's human but the capabilities aren't the same. (Humans generally don't spend a month being trained on all github code and remember large chunks of it for regurgitation at superhuman speeds, nor can they be horizontally scaled after learning.) You can still be of the opinion that this is fine, and I may or may not be fine with it as well, I just don't think the stated reason holds up to logic and other opinions ought to "baffle" you
  • az226 3y ago
    And GitHub’s EULA gives it the right to train Copilot on public code you host on GitHub.
    • Aachen 3y ago
      That's great, but GP's argument was > Copilot does not 'steal' or and reproduce our code - it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it. Not "the terms of use you agreed to allow them to do it". Different argument with different amount of merit in my opinion
      • az226 3y ago
        Agreed. I was just saying in the current environment GitHub has that license, nobody else has. So if the courts decide one day that because machines learn differently from humans, they will allow copyright holders to add a license exception that disallows machine training, then GitHub will benefit from this. It’s kind of ironical. What’s best for society is to not have any such law enacted and continue to allow open source models to progress alongside proprietary ones (in addition to more level competitive dynamics on the proprietary side).
        • bombolo 3y ago
• hnbad 3y ago
  Potayto potahto. We all know there's a difference between training a machine learning model and learning a skill as a human being. Even if you can trick yourself into believing AI is just kinda like how human brains work maybe, the obvious difference is that you can't just grow yourself a second brain and treat it like a slave whereas having more money means you can build a bigger and better AI and throw more resources at operating it. Intellectual property is a nebulous concept to begin with, if you really try to understand it. There's a reason copyright claim systems like those at YouTube don't really concern themselves with ownership (that's what DMCA claims are for) but instead with the arbitrary terms of service that don't require you to have a degree in order to determine the boundaries of "fair use" (even if it mimics legal language to dictate these terms and their exemptions). The problem isn't AI. The problem is property. Ever since Enclosure we've been trying to dull the edges of property rights to make sure people can actually still survive despite them. At some point you have to ask yourself if maybe the problem isn't how sharp the blade you're cutting yourself is but whether you should instead stop cutting. We can have "free culture" but then we can't have private property.
• lewhoo 3y ago
  If "like a human" is enough to get human rights then why did I get a parking ticket even when I argued that my car just stands there like a human ? This really isn't as good a defense as people portray. There are a lot of rights and privileges granted to humans but not to objects - we can all agree on that I think.
  • datavirtue 3y ago
    And if you need a person with supercharged rights and a slippery amount of liability...form a corporation.
• jeroenhd 3y ago
  Copilot has been caught multiple times reproducing code verbatim. At some point it spat out some guy's complete "about me" blog page. That's not learning, that's copying in a roundabout way. Also, AI doesn't learn "like a human". Neural networks are an extremely simplistic representation of a biological brain and the details of how learning and human memory works aren't even all that clear yet. Open source code usually comes with expectations for the people who use it. That expectation can be as simple as requiring a reference back to the authors, adding a license file to clarify what the source was based on, or in more extreme cases putting licensing requirements on the final product. Unless Microsoft complies with the various project licenses, I don't see why this is antithetical to the idea of open source at all.
• flumpcakes 3y ago
  AI doesn't "learn". It's statistical inference if anything. If I took two copy-righted pictures and layered them on top of each other at 50% opacity. Would that be OK or copy right infringement? AI models just use more weights/biases and more images (or any input).
  • vadiml 3y ago
    And what is LEARNING in your opinion?
    • intelVISA 3y ago
      TRAINING your 3rd eye/branch predictor if(nonfree_software){ // unhappy path }
    • flumpcakes 3y ago
      Cambridge dictionary has it as: "knowledge or a piece of information obtained by study or experience". If I scanned a thousand polaroid pictures, and took their average RGB values and created a LUT that I could apply to any photograph to make it look "polaroidy" - would that be learned? Or the application of a statistical inference model? This alone is probably far enough abstracted to never be an ethical or legal issue. However, if I had a model that was only "trained" on Stephen King books, and used it to write a novel, would that be OK? Or do you think it would be in the realm of copyright infringement? By your definition anything a computer does means it has learned it. If I copy and paste a picture, has the computer "learned" it while it reads out the data byte-by-byte? That sure sounds like it is "studying" the picture. "AI" and "ML" are just statistics powered by computers that can do billions of calculations per second. It is not special, it is not "learning". To portray some value to it as something else is disingenuous at best, and fraud at worst.
      • CapsAdmin 3y ago
        Your polaroid example would require someone to write code that does that one specific thing. You could also argue that this would violate copyright if it was trained on some photographer's specific unique style, made as an app and marketed as being able to mimic the photographer's style. But in your example you have 1000 random polaroid images of unknown origin, so somehow it becomes abstract enough that it doesn't become an issue. In your stephen king example I would say it's still learned, because the "code" is a general language model that can learn anything. It's just you decided to only train it on stephen king novels. If you have an image model that trained 100% on public domain images and finetune it to replicate a specific artist's style I would personally think the finetuned model and its creator is maybe violating copyright. But when it comes to learning I would say when you write a program whose purpose is to learn the next word or pixel, but it's up to the computer to figure out how to do that, the computer is learning when you feed it input data. It's the program's job to figure out the best way to predict, not the programmer. (it's not that black and white given that the programmer will also sometimes guide the program, but you get the idea) When you write a program that does one or several things, it's not learning. I think it's something to do with the difference between emergent behavior from simple rules and intentional behavior from complex rules.
• josefx 3y ago
  > all this discussion on copyrights in the age of AI. copyright is a thing, AI do not change that. > does not 'steal' or and reproduce our code - it simply LEARNS from it as a human And here we have the central problem, does it act like a human or does it not act like a human? Humans copy things they learn all the time, some of us know various songs by heart, others will even quote entire movies from memory. If AI can learn and reproduce things like humans do then you need to take steps to ensure that the output is properly stripped from any content that might infringe on existing copyrighted works.
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    There is a definite difference between singing a song while walking down the street and writing down the lyrics, putting it in a database, claiming it’s my content and then selling it on, even if it’s slightly rehashed.
• pppkkkiii 3y ago
  If that were true, Copilot would have been scanning windows and office source code. But we don't see that.
  • datavirtue 3y ago
    Nobody wants that.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      I want that. I very much want someone to take one of the Windows code leaks, use it to train a LLM, and then make a fork of ReactOS with AI-completed implementations of everything ReactOS hasn't yet finished. Because then we could find out if Microsoft really believes that LLMs are fair use:)
• oytis 3y ago
  "Learning" is a technical term, AI doesn't really learn the same way a human does. There is a huge difference between allowing your fellow human beings to learn from you and allowing corporations to appropriate your knowledge by passing it through a stochastic shuffler.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • zirgs 3y ago
    Individuals can train their own LLMs too.
    • oytis 3y ago
      Copilot is run by a corporation, and the model is owned by the corporation - despite being trained on open source data. In general individuals will have problems with the first L of LLMs - unless the community invents a way to democratise LLMs and deep learning in general. So far deep learning space a much less friendly place for individuals than software was when ideals of open source movement were formed.
      • zirgs 3y ago
        A full LLM is too expensive for individuals to train, but LoRAs aren't. There are multiple open source LLMs out there that can be extended. We can already see it in AI art scene. People are training their own checkpoints and LoRAs of celebrities, art styles and other stuff that aren't included in base models. Some artists demand to be excluded from base model training datasets, but there's nothing they can do against individuals who want to copy their style - other than not posting their art publicly at all. I see the same thing here. If your source code is public - someone will find a way to train an AI on it.
• 9991 3y ago
  Apes love moralizing and being indignant. This joker wants to share open source code and restrict what other people do with it.
  • bombolo 3y ago
    So, like any license except public domain? Have you personally ever put out something in public domain?
    • 9991 3y ago
      I’ve released plenty under GPL. Not possible to assign to public domain everywhere.
      • bombolo 3y ago
        So you restrict what to do with it…
• asimpletune 3y ago
  No disrespect but I am baffled by your statement that it learns, even to go so far as to say as a human coder would learn. I don't really want this to comment to be perceived as flame bait (AI seems to be a very sensitive topic in the same sense as crypto currency), so instead let me just pose a simple question. If Copilot really learns as a human, then why don't we just train it on a CS curriculum instead of millions of examples of code written by humans?
  • mirekrusin 3y ago
    We do but we also simulate it doing homework very well.
  • spuz 3y ago
    I think the comment was trying to draw the distinction between a database and a language model. The database of code on GitHub is many terabytes large, but the model trained on it is significantly smaller. This should tell us that a language model cannot reproduce copyrighted code byte for byte because the original data simply doesn't exist. Similarly, when you and I read a block of code, it leaves our memory pretty quickly and we wouldn't be able to reproduce it byte for byte if we wanted. We say the model learns like a human because it is able to extract generalised patterns from viewing many examples. That doesn't mean it learns exactly like a human but it's also definitely not a database. The problem is that in reality, even though the original data is gone, a language model like Copilot _can_ reproduce some code byte for byte somehow drawing the information from the weights in its network and the result is a reproduction of copyrighted work.
    • asimpletune 3y ago
      I see what you're going for, and I respect your point of view, but also respectfully I think the logic is a little circular. To say "it's not a database, it's a language model, and that means it extracts generalized patterns from viewing examples, just like humans" to me that just means that occasionally humans behave like language models. That doesn't mean though that therefore it thinks like a human, but rather sometimes humans think like a language model (a fundamental algorithm), which is circular. It hardly makes sense to justify that a language model learns like a human, just because people also occasionally copy patterns and search/replace values and variable names. To really make the comparison honest, we have to be more clear about the hypothetical humans in question. For a human who has truly learned from looking at many examples, we could have a conversation with them and they would demonstrate a deeper sense of understanding behind the meaning of what they copied. This is something a LLM could not do. On the other hand, if a person really had no idea, like someone who copied answers from someone else in a test, we'd just say well you don't really understand this and you're just x degrees away from having copied their answers verbatim. I believe LLMs are emulating this behavior and not the former. I mean, how many times in your life have you talked to a human being who clearly had no idea what they were doing because they copied something and didn't understand it all? If that's the analogy that's being made then I'd say it's a bad one, because it is actually choosing the one time where humans don't understand what they've done as a false equivalence to language models thinking like a human. Basically, sometimes humans meaninglessly parrot things too.
• friendzis 3y ago
  > it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it Does it though? It "learns" correlations between tokens/sequences. A human coder would look at a piece of code and learn an algorithm. The AI "learns" token structure. A human reproducing original code verbatim would be incidental. AI (language model, at least) producing algorithm-implementing code would be incidental.
• sureglymop 3y ago
  But.. to be clear what you can and can't do with certain code depends on the license. Imagine code that is "open source" as in openly visible and available, yet the license explicitly forbids the use of it to train any AI/LLM. Now how could the creator enforce that? Don't get me wrong, I am aware that the enforcement of such licenses is already hard (even for organizations like the FSF).. but now you are going up against something automated where you might not even know what exactly happens.
• pull_my_finger 3y ago
  I'm in several communities for smaller/niche languages and asking questions about things that have few sources make it much more clear that it's not "learning" but grabbing passages/chunks of source. Maybe with subjects that have more coverage it can assimilate more "original" sounding output.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• webmobdev 3y ago
  I would have no problem if such AI systems are also completely open source, can be run by me on my system and come with all models to use them also easily available (again in some form of opensource license). I genuinely don't see that happening in the future with BigTech. As such, as a proponent of FSF GPL philosophy, I have no interest in supporting such systems with my hard work, my source code. So yes, I do consider it stealing - my hard labour in any GPL opensource work is meant for the public good (for example, to preserve our right to repair by ensuring the source code is always available through the GPL license). Any corporate that uses my work, for profit, without either paying me or blocking the public good that I am trying for is simply exploiting me and the goodwill of others like me.
• goodpoint 3y ago
  > it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it. This is really not how LLMs work.
• otikik 3y ago
  > it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it What humans do to learn is intuitive, but it is not simple. What the machine does is also not simple, it involves some tricky math. Precisely if the process was simple, then it could be more easily argued that the machine is "just copying" - that is simple. There's a lot of nuance here. What the machine is doing "looks similar to what humans do from the exterior", the same way that a plane flying "looks similar" to a flying bird. But the airplane does not flap its wings. > kind of irrational and antithetical to open source ideas Open source ideas are not the only ideas in town.
• cccbbbaaa 3y ago
  Plenty of people already argued that LLMs don't actually learn like a human. However, you should keep in mind the reason why clean-room reverse engineering exists: humans learn from source material. FLOSS RE projects (e.g. nouveau) typically don't like leaks, because some contributors might be exposed to copyrighted material. Sometimes, the opposite happens: people working on proprietary software are not allowed to see the source of a FLOSS alternative.
• Twirrim 3y ago
  > it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it. It doesn't LEARN anything, let alone like a human coder would. It has absolutely zero understanding. It's not actually intelligent. It's a highly tuned mathematical model that predicts what the next word should be.
  • BlueTemplar 3y ago
    I can also learn things with no understanding (like a foreign word), I doubt that would make me immune to copyright ?
    • Twirrim 3y ago
      If you were to learn a phrase that insulted the king in Thai, and said it in Thailand, you would end up in jail. Doesn't matter if you understood what the phrase said. Ignorance doesn't make you immune to consequences.
• anileated 3y ago
  Copilot does not steal. Copilot does not learn. If you want to apply these concepts to LLMs, first prove how an LLM is human and then explain why it doesn’t have human rights. Rather, Copilot is a tool. Microsoft/ClosedAI operate this tool. Commercially. They crawl original works and through running ML on it automatically generate and sell derivative works from those original works, without any consent or compensation. They are the ones who violate copyright, not Copilot.
• sethd 3y ago
  Your comment implies that we’re in some age of AGI, but we’re not there yet. Some argue that we’re not even close, but who knows, that’s all speculation. > it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it. The LLM doesn’t learn, the authors of the LLM are encoding copyright protected content into a model using gradient decent and other techniques. Now as far as I understand the law, that’s OK. The problems arise when distribution of the model comes into play. I’m curious, are you a programmer yourself? Don’t take this the wrong way, but I want to understand the background of people who coming to the kind of conclusion you seemed to arrive at about how LLMs work.
• dingledork69 3y ago
  The company that trains/owns the AI steals the content.
• Merad 3y ago
  Whether an LLM actually learns is completely tangential to the topic at hand. A human coder who learned from copyrighted code and then reproduced that code (intentionally or not) would be in violation of the copyright. This is why projects like Wine are so careful about doing clean room implementations. As an aside, it seems really strange to invoke "open source ideas" as an argument in favor of a for-profit company building a closed source product that relies on millions of lines of open source code.
  • bamboozled 3y ago
    It’s also fair to say that a lot of this carefulness has probably made life difficult for the developers of wine, but they wanted to avoid Microsoft’s legal team. So they respected the copyright laws. Here is Microsoft doing as Microsoft does…
• lucideer 3y ago
  > IMHO desire to prevent learning from your open source code seems kind of irrational and antithetical to open source ideas You may be right that this is antithetical to "open source" ideas, as Tim O'Reilly would've defined it - a la MIT/BSD/&c., but it's very much in line with copyleft ideas as RMS would've defined it - a la GPL/EUPL/&c. - which is what's being explicitly discussed in this article. The two are not the same: "open source" is about widespread "open" use of source code, copyleft is much more discerning and aims to carefully temper reuse in such a way that prioritises end user liberty.