Co-Pilot seems to openly admit itself that open-source code is repurposed (or stolen?) without adhering to attribution. This seems concerning.

[ell1e]

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Co-Pilot seems to openly admit itself that open-source code is repurposed without adhering to attribution requirements:

It seems to me like training such an AI in such a non-adhering manner on GitHub projects risks causing major damage to developer relations and trust, and could be perceived as theft. I would like to suggest this practice should therefore be reviewed and changed. An alternative would for example be to ask projects to opt-in with some sort of incentive to do so, e.g. a wider range of co-pilot access for free or similar.

While I heard sometimes this is worked around via an automated duplicate detection, I assume that will never catch all corner cases and it seems more prudent to rework the training data.

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[albjeremias]

All code generated by co-pilot should be pubslished open source automatically to somewhere. Also all attributions should be added somehow. you expensive engineers, sort it out

[Anonymous941]

That wouldn't be enough, attribution would also be required, and for GPL code it would have to require only using code under a GPL-compatible license

[ell1e]

I think the idea expressed here was, if Co-Pilot gave licensing and attribution info for every snippet the user would be able to make an informed decision whether it can be integrated into their project sensibly.

[ell1e]

This casts more doubt on Microsoft's generative AI practices, and by extension Co-Pilot: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/21/openai-whistleblower-dead-aged-26

If you properly licensed training data, which could on GitHub easily happen with a wide-ranging opt-in that is incentivized by something, or alternatively Co-Pilot properly attributed each section involved in a response, it seems to me like none of this would be an issue. (I'm not a lawyer however.)

[Anonymous941]

Microsoft may do many awful things, but I doubt murder is one of them...

[ell1e]

Perhaps you are correct on this one. Out of the concerning AI news, I may have picked one that is a bit of a stretch. But there's enough others left.

[Anonymous941]

Definitely

[evdcush]

Related:

Does Microsoft/GitHub include individual's private repos as training data for Copilot? #135400

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/135400

[ell1e]

There's a new variant of this question, by the way, but still limited to private repos.

If Co-Pilot doesn't adhere to attribution, which it seems to suggest with its own statements, I wonder what's with the public repos.