Hacker News Reader

Comment by zxzax | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why anyone has an issue with that. You know what else can copy and paste code all the time? Humans. But we have various ways of stopping employees who copy and paste code from stackoverflow and github without checking the license, so it's the same thing if you use one of these tools. There's nothing new I can see here to be upset about.

This would be a lot more interesting if it showed the various GPT-3 experiments at generating music and used that as a point of comparison.

View on HN

> But we have various ways of stopping employees who copy and paste code from stackoverflow and github without checking the license

What would those be? I’ve worked at a number of organizations that were (rightfully) paranoid about accidentally incorporating GPL code, but even there I wasn’t aware of automated tooling to prevent it, it was only enforced through developer vigilance.

If you actually want a paid service, there are plagiarism detectors like Fossa and Codequiry. Although in my opinion, code review should be enough to catch any "accidental" incidents of plagiarism, the differences in writing style should make it very obvious when the employee has copied something. That of course probably won't apply if you suspect the employee is intentionally changing it around to obfuscate the origin of the code, but it seems that wouldn't be the case if they were just committing the output straight from a neural net. But automated scanners probably won't be able to catch those well either -- the way to catch that would be to make them do pair programming a lot.

>Although in my opinion, code review should be enough to catch any "accidental" incidents of plagiarism, the differences in writing style should make it very obvious when the employee has copied something.

You must do some CSI level code reviews. Best I'm able to do is figure out if code will work and if something can be done obviously better. Stylistic calls (beyond lint enforceable) are up to authors as far as I'm concerned.

And even then it's trivial to fix up naming schemes and such to march codebase - doubt that gets you out of copyright issues.

I mean in cases where someone just copy and pastes something without making any effort to match the style, or in cases where they can't explain what a piece of code does or how they came up with it. You should be able to spot those very easily in code review. If somebody is trying to fix up the naming schemes to avoid being detected and for whatever reason is able to explain the code perfectly, then I'd imagine that person would probably be doing the same bad things regardless of using copilot -- it's not like it's hard to search stackoverflow and github for code snippets.

But I think copilot matches code style, no ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com