My Whitepaper About GitHub Copilot

Please see the disclaimer. In July, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) put out a call for whitepapers about the “philosophical and legal questions” around GitHub’s Copilot. I wanted to write one, but decided not to until encouraged to do so by an employee of the FSF. By that time, I only had five days to write it, so the paper ended being subpar, but I got it in. As to be expected, my paper was not chosen for publication, and I don’t blame them....

October 27, 2021 | 1 min | 186 words

Poisoning GitHub Copilot and Machine Learning

Please see the disclaimer. Update, 08 July 2021: GitHub has confirmed that all public code that was on their servers was used to train Copilot. That means some of my code was used, though it was older versions. I suggest deleting all code off of GitHub if you can. GitHub has been on my radar before, and it wasn’t for a good reason. Well, it’s on my radar again, and it’s once again not for a good reason: Copilot....

July 7, 2021 | 9 min | 1854 words