Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

Posted May 13, 2024 20:39 UTC (Mon) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
In reply to: Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy by atnot
Parent article: Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy

Have you tried something like CoPilot? I've been trying it out a bit over the last three weeks (somewhat grudgingly). One of the things that became clear quite soon is that it does not just gets it code from StackOverflow and GitHub and the like; it clearly tries to adapt to the body of code I'm working on (it certainly doesn't always gets it right, but that's a different story.)

An example, to make things more concrete. Let's say I have a struct with about a dozen members, and a list of key-value pairs, where those keys are the same as the names of the struct members, and I want to assign the values to the struct members. I'll start writing something like:

for (auto &kv: kv_pairs) {
	if (kv.first == "name")
		mystruct.name = kv.second;
	// ...
}

It then doesn't take long before CoPilot starts autocompleting with the remaining struct members, offering me the exact code I was trying to write, even when I'm pretty sure the names I'm using are unique and not present in publicly accessible sources.

I'm not commenting on the usefulness of all this; I'm just showing that what it does is not just applying StackOverflow and GitHub to my code.

We probably should remember that LLMs are not all alike. It's very well possible that e.g. ChatGPT would have a worse "understanding" (for lack of a better word) of my code, and would rely much more on what it learned before from public sources.