> Microsoft will likely need to add checks to prevent copilot from offering verbatim copies of code going forward to try to avoid copyright violations here.
Or they could integrate a way to find the produced output back in the corpus if it's sufficiently close and provide a reference/attribution. Basically whatever tool a copyright lawyer would use to track down original work.
And that's just the engineering solution. The AI researcher solution would be to extend AI learning algorithms to attach attribution metadata to the learned data so that the output could already come annotated with information about the source.
But the latter is much harder to do, so maybe the engineering solution would suffice.
A Twitter thread linked yesterday showed that a keyword and the name of the original code's author in the Copilot prompt produced an almost exact copy of that developer's code. Copilot already does know the origin sometimes.
> Or they could integrate a way to find the produced output back in the corpus if it's sufficiently close and provide a reference/attribution. Basically whatever tool a copyright lawyer would use to track down original work.
That assumes that the licenses of your code and the original code are compatible which often isn't the case.
No, it doesn't assume that. Ensuring that they are compatible would be the next step. Either manually by the user or automatically by showing a fat warning or retracting the suggested code completion.
Or they could integrate a way to find the produced output back in the corpus if it's sufficiently close and provide a reference/attribution. Basically whatever tool a copyright lawyer would use to track down original work.
And that's just the engineering solution. The AI researcher solution would be to extend AI learning algorithms to attach attribution metadata to the learned data so that the output could already come annotated with information about the source.
But the latter is much harder to do, so maybe the engineering solution would suffice.