Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 2, 2022 21:45 UTC (Sat) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come! by ballombe
Parent article: Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

> You are reversing the duty of proof. It is Microsoft to prove this cannot happen, not us.

That's ridiculous. You can't prove a negative. It's the same as asking someone to prove they're not beating their spouse.

If Microsoft came out with a statement that as far as they can tell it doesn't happen, people will just claim they're lying. The only relevant evidence is if someone comes up with actual examples.

This is even leaving aside of code formatters like Black which are so opinionated it's almost that the point that for any piece of code there is only one way it can be formatted, so you couldn't even tell the different between an actual copy and an accidental one if you wanted to.

If you take a step back and think about what it would take to build such an AI model, if the model has any understanding of the structure of code, there's no reason at all to think that it will randomly copy entire blocks of text literally from the input. It's going to be working at a completely different level.

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Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 3, 2022 15:13 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

> If you take a step back and think about what it would take to build such an AI model, if the model has any understanding of the structure of code, there's no reason at all to think that it will randomly copy entire blocks of text literally from the input. It's going to be working at a completely different level.

Nobody outside MS really know how copilot actually work, so you cannot make any claim about it. 'AI model' is just a buzzword.

I do not see how the Math.isPrime example can occur outside literal copying.
copilot seems to be less transformative than a C compiler generating machine code and so far binaries have always been considered derivative from the source.