Re:GitHub’s AI Copilot Might Get You Sued If You Use It
by onli on Friday July 09, 2021 @11:07AM
(#27784451)
You are making it sound as if the system only copies full functions verbatim, but that's not the case. See https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio... (as linked in a different comment thread here).
And btw, clowns take? That's no way to enter into a productive discussion.
> Nobody cares particularly if you feed data into an algorithm of your choice. I can feed data into a hash algorithm all day and that won't come back to bite me.
I showed examples to the contrary in my other comment.
Re:GitHub’s AI Copilot Might Get You Sued If You Use It
by louthy on Friday July 09, 2021 @11:16AM
(#27784538)
> You are making it sound as if the system only copies full functions verbatim
It doesn't only do that, but it does do that [1]. And that is the issue. It doesn't matter if it only does this 1% of the time, it's enough to be high risk.
[1] https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
This particular algorithm isn't learning anything, it's a big pattern matching/information retrieval system. It wasn't fed tokens, AST, constructs, type information, it was fed pure source code hoping the oblique magic in between would make it develop understanding. Nothing of the sort happened and it is instead regurgitating input data verbatim, which is the obvious copyright issue at hand.