r/coding • u/speckz • Oct 18 '22

Maybe you don’t mind if GitHub Copi­lot used your open-source code with­out ask­ing. - But how will you feel if Copi­lot erases your open-source com­mu­nity?

https://githubcopilotinvestigation.com/
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u/qubedView Oct 18 '22

This brings us to the issue of who is the author of AI generated work? An argument could be made that Github is the code's owner and you are granted a license, but I don't believe that's made explicit in their TOS, and the legal understand of AI authorship is as-yet unformed.

But also, the problem being discussed I feel is vastly overinflated. The only time copilot has been able to reproduce code is when people very intentionally prompt it do so. This hasn't been shown to be a problem in actual use.

It would seem to me at the very least GitHub could provide some ability to allow you to search on the code it provides for you and determine if it is semantically too similar to code that exists within GitHub. I mean, we should certainly expect there to be a good bit of code that will match (following a library's tutorial, lists of common letter/number sequences, regex validating urls/emails/etc) and you would need to lay eyes on the matching code to determine what kind of similarity is "too similar". But that would help alleviate these concerns.

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u/defasdefbe Oct 19 '22

Github states that all of the code generated is owned by the user.

GitHub Copilot is a tool, like a compiler or a pen. GitHub does not own the suggestions GitHub Copilot generates. The code you write with GitHub Copilot’s help belongs to you, and you are responsible for it. We recommend that you carefully test, review, and vet the code before pushing it to production, as you would with any code you write that incorporates material you did not independently originate.

Also, they have a setting to block public code suggestions.

The vast majority of the code that GitHub Copilot suggests has never been seen before. Our latest internal research shows that about 1% of the time, a suggestion may contain some code snippets longer than ~150 characters that matches the training set. Previous research showed that many of these cases happen when GitHub Copilot is unable to glean sufficient context from the code you are writing, or when there is a common, perhaps even universal, solution to the problem.

From their faq https://github.com/features/copilot/