Pardon my cursing but this kind of blew my mind (CoPilot)

Off Topic
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I don’t see where there is a problem. There are other similar systems that could steer into copyright. One is called Captain Stack.

This feature is somewhat similar to Github Copilot’s code suggestion. But instead of using AI, it sends your search query to Google, then retrieves StackOverflow answers and autocompletes them for you.

Code Grepper is similar in that an individual person’s code is used.

But I find the idea of training on code a much harder copyright case to make. If looking at multiple pieces of user code across GitHub and coming up with a solution is considered copyright infringement, then we’ll all be going to jail! :thinking:

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A coders first few years is pretty much all copy paste right?

1 Like
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First few years pffft
More like first few years is spent learning what to look for
The rest is using those skills to find the shit faster :joy:

7 Likes
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StackOverflow and GitHub are similar, but GitHub has licenses attached to the code that dictate how it can be used. CoPilot’s suggestions have been trained on public GitHub repositories.

GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set.

Since some of the code on GitHub has Open Source Only licenses, some of the suggestions could end up in closed source projects.

Not that my above statements are proof of myself being the saint of programming :eyes:, but thought this above information could be interesting to see who files the first lawsuit against who lol.

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Hmmm. Not sure what I think yet. Seems almost like if you take their position to the logical extreme, than anything you ever learned from an open source project you either shouldn’t use or should use whatever license it had… We learn in a similar way to these machine learning algorithms supposedly right?

Exactly…

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Spokespeople for Microsoft and GitHub were unable to comment for this article. However, GitHub’s documentation for Copilot warns that the output may contain “undesirable patterns” and puts the onus of intellectual property infringement on the user of Copilot.

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@Mark_Wonsil was right

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There is a CoPilot extension for VS2022 now. I haven’t started my free demo yet but plan too my next project.