Why is Copilot so bad?

Posted Jul 2, 2022 16:02 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: Why is Copilot so bad? by SLi
Parent article: Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

> It's fundamentally not at all different from a human reading publically available code and using the memories formed that way to write more.

If a corporation is allowed to bleach the copyleft off of your code by using it as feedstock for an incomprehensibly complex computer algorithm and then asking the algorithm to solve that problem, copyleft is gravely wounded.

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Why is Copilot so bad?

Posted Jul 2, 2022 22:12 UTC (Sat) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

> If a corporation is allowed to bleach the copyleft off of your code by using it as feedstock for an incomprehensibly complex computer algorithm and then asking the algorithm to solve that problem, copyleft is gravely wounded.

How is this different to anyone looking at copylefted code in Github for inspiration to solve a problem they're having, and then using that idea, written in their own way, in their own program? Copyright is focussed on the copying of expression, not the copying of ideas. As long as you can argue the model is copying the idea, not the expression, copyright is completely irrelevant.

The whole issue comes down to the distinction we've made in copyright law between what compilers do (which is considered pure manipulation having no effect on copyright), and what people do (which is looking at pieces of source code to learn and use that to make more source code). Isn't the rule of thumb: if you're copying from one source it's plagiarism, if you're copying from two it's research?

I don't really see how a model built on examining lots of source, some copylefted, producing code reduces the value of the input code. If a computer model can actually come up with code that does something you've typed, perhaps it wasn't so original and it's the kind of thing we want to automate away anyway.

TBH, the idea of a model writing code for you to solve a problem sounds nice. But what would be really valuable is something that could see where many programs are solving a similar problem, that it makes a library for that and refactors all the other programs to use that.

Why is Copilot so bad?

Posted Jul 5, 2022 9:38 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Treating it as comparable to a human is what I suspect the courts will do, and rsidd has pointed out that music precedent in the case of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" suggests that if Copilot does output snippets of its training data unchanged, then unless that snippet is "purely functional", it'll be found to be a copyright infringement by the user of Copilot.

That's a risk for any user of Copilot to assess - are they OK about a possible infringement suit caused by the fact that Copilot has access to code owned by Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and other entities whose code is on GitHub?