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A comment on I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot.

Re:I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as t... by Barrin92 on Saturday July 03, 2021 @08:39PM (#27726325)
For anyone who thinks this is even remotely okay, answer me this. Imagine that Copilot is actually just a gigantic PR campaign, and when you send a completion request, they do this:

They send the request off to a sweatshop in Bangladesh where a bunch of mechanical turk workers scroll through licensed codebases, find an appropriate snippet of code, agree on the best one, strip all of the licenses and attributions out, and send it back to you. (turns out they're very quick at their job)

How is this any different than what Copilot does with the purely technical difference that you're pushing code through an artifical neural net instead of a bunch of human ones. Why is that supposed to matter

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Re:I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as t... by iafisher on Saturday July 03, 2021 @09:25PM (#27726585)
In your hypothetical 100% of completions are copied verbatim from existing code. But if GitHub is to believed, only 0.1% are.
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Re:I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as t... by daenz on Saturday July 03, 2021 @09:46PM (#27726672)
It doesn't sound like the person you're replying to understands that the code returned is largely synthesized with OpenAI's Codex. It is not simply a "snippet selection" mechanism, it has "learned" (to a limited degree) patterns in code, and can generate those patterns even if they don't exist verbatim from the training set.
[ Parent | on HN ]