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Comment by M4v3R | Hacker News Reader

While I understand the sentiment wasn’t Copilot trained on code not only hosted on GitHub, but found all over the Internet? Which means hosting your code yourself would not prevent GitHub from using it to train Copilot. That raises an interesting question though - how do you opt out? Is there even a way to do it?

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robots.txt, or a copyright notice saying the code can't be used to train AI which bots will ignore and open their corporate masters to liability.

on edit: fixed typo

This kind of learning needs to be opt-in, not opt-out.

I would also be extremely surprised if most open source copyright holders didn't already expect their licensing terms to protect against this kind of code/authorship laundering. Speaking individually, I know that it certainly surprised me to hear that GitHub thinks that it's probably okay to regurgitate entire fragments of the training set without preserving the license.

Bad news for you. Japanese copyright law, article 47-7 explicitly allow using copyrightable works for data analysis by means of a computer(including recording a derivative work created by adaptation)

It should be considered as fair-use of USA except we don't use Common Law system so we explicitly state what exempt from the copyright protection.

Thanks for the bad news! Not glad to hear it but glad to know something I didn't.

That said - so they would be able to sell some things in Japan that they couldn't other places.

What if a Japanese software company uses it to write software, which is then sold in the US?

It's still copyright laundering, if you ask me.

robots.txt is a convention for those who want to be good 'web citizens' rather than legally binding. It does absolutely nothing to stop someone who ignores your wishes. For example, there are tons of bots that ignore robots.txt entirely or even go straight for the thing (i.e. 'hey, thanks for telling us where to look!') you're telling them to avoid in robots.txt. While copyright is a mechanism that can be used if you can make the case, and have the means, it will only work for entities that have something to lose and are within a jurisdiction where it matters.

I'm not surprised. I imagine all images on the internet are used to train image classifiers as well. It's a shitty future, but it's the one we have.

Researchers in our lab created a huge dataset of facial expressions from images on the web, annotated it and published the URLs to the images and the annotations for research but made sure to search only for images with proper licenses. I don't think that you are allowed to just go download any old image and train on it. I understand the many many people do it, but it's not legal (as far as I know, please correct me if I'm wrong).

> I don't think that you are allowed to just go download any old image and train on it.

My understanding as a two-year student of ML is that you are allowed in the US to go download any old image, train on it, and then release the model as long as the outputs are "sufficiently transformative."

That last phrase is the key part, and has never been tested in court. It's entirely possible that either I'm mistaken here, or that the courts will soon say that I am mistaken here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FA_gt9w28o&ab_channel=guava...

To be clear: "transformative" not meaning merely "altered" but really meaning "repurposed"; if the new work is something people could feasibly use instead of the old work (harming the author's original market), it isn't "transformative".

Yes. For example, arfa ran into this question when launching https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/. Lots of furry artists had exactly the same concerns with his work there, but that work is decisively transformative.

Copilot seems ... well, less transformative. I'm still not sure how to feel.

I guess it goes back to closed source / trade secrets territory. If you have something you really don't want stolen, it is safer to never expose it and never trust that the law will fairly protect you.

The irony is that copilot won't suggest its own source code, just everyone else's. It is open source without the benefits.

Smells like Microsoft

More like OpenAI

I would like to know this too. I understand that GitHub is a private company and you have to accept their T&C, but surely they aren't allowed to use source code found elsewhere on the internet to train their ML models without asking for permission first unless it's a B2B cooperation such as with Stackoverflow.

According to the discussion at this link, you do not need permission to use copyrighted data to train AI models. Copyright prevents you from copying data, it doesn't prevent you from learning from it.

https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410985742268911631...

To train your model, yeah, probably ok. But I don't think anybody will see people using the duplicated code that AI insert on your codebase the same way.

Oh man I can’t imagine the consequences for certain languages and frameworks if it uses SO answers though. Imagine if it trained in all the dumb and ancient answers like “how do I get the length of a string in javascript” and took the first accepted answer of “use jquery”

This raises an issue of trolling. What prevents developers to generate "inappropriate" code to feed it to this algorithm the same way they did with the Microsoft Chat bot for example? That will surely reflect on the quality of code generated by this AI system and therefore the stability and security of applications built.

I’m sure this will happen, and there will definitely be instances of the bot giving users bad code, but it would be incredibly difficult to make it solely give out bad code.

> how do you opt out? Is there even a way to do it?

Yeah, don't post your code in the public for everyone to read. If I am musician, and I play my song publicly, people will hum it if they like it. I can't do anything to stop that, except not play the song to anyone.

It’s a different thing when random people start humming or even singing your song in private, and an entirely different thing when a big corporation uses your work to train a system that will at some points generate parts of your works and will make them millions of dollars of your and everyone else’s code without attributing anyone in any way.

Plus, to be honest I’m not even sure whether I’m for or against that, I am just wondering if one was against it but still wants to do open source work do they have any recourse?

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