2 years ago

Category: github, artificial-intelligence

Earlier this week, GitHub introduced GitHub Copilot, a new feature that it is referring to as “your AI pair programmer” but might also be appropriately called “IntelliSense on steroids.” Built using OpenAI Codex, a new system that the company says is “significantly more capable than GPT-3 in code generation,” the tool not only autocompletes lines of code but will offer entire blocks of code in response to both code that you type and natural language.

github copilot was trained on open source code and the sum total of everything it knows was drawn from that code.

In a more definitive take, Andres Guadamuz, a senior lecturer in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex and the Editor in Chief of the Journal of World Intellectual Property, takes up the question of whether or not GitHub Copilot is infringing copyright, concluding that “this is neither copyright infringement nor license breach, but I’m happy to be convinced of the contrary.”

As I have explained, I find it extremely unlikely that similar code copied in this manner would meet the threshold of copyright infringement, there is not enough code copied, and even if there is, it appears to be mostly very basic code that is common to other projects.”