THE BACKLASH

Not long after Copilot’s launch, some developers started sounding alarms over the use of public code to train the tool’s AI.

One concern is that if Copilot reproduces large enough chunks of existing code, it could violate copyright or effectively launder open-source code into commercial uses without proper licensing. The tool can also spit out personal details that developers have posted publicly, and in one case it reproduced widely-cited code from the 1999 PC Game Quake III.

Hi. I know you’re excited about copilot.

GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you for copilot after you help train it further.

It’s truly disappointing to watch people cheer at having their work and time exploited by a company worth billions.

— Brian P. Hogan (@bphogan) July 2, 2021

Cole Garry, a Github spokesperson, declined to comment on those issues and only pointed to the company’s existing FAQ on Copilot’s web page, which does acknowledge that the tool can produce verbatim code snippets from its training data. This happens roughly 0.1% of the time, GitHub says, typically when users don’t provide enough context around their requests or when the problem has a commonplace solution. The company’s FAQ says:

“We are building an origin tracker to help detect the rare instances of code that is repeated from the training set, to help you make good real-time decisions about GitHub Copilot’s suggestions.”

In the meantime, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has argued that training machine learning systems on public data are fair use, though he acknowledged that “IP and AI will be an interesting policy discussion” in which the company will be an eager participant. The tool also has defenders outside of Microsoft, including Google Cloud principal engineer Kelsey Hightower. He said that developers should be as afraid of GitHub Copilot as mathematicians are of calculators.

There was a plethora of features announced at WWDC for macOS Monterrey, focusing more on refinements across the board after last year’s huge redesign in Big Sur. However, developers were excited by the improvements in how they can create and improve their apps, with TestFlight being the highlight for many.

This is an app that developers have been wanting for years, ever since it appeared on iOS in September of 2014. Before, they would have to create their own methods of distributing test versions of their apps to users on the Mac, but now it’s about to be much easier.

What is TestFlight?

This is Apple’s application for allowing developers to release test versions of their apps. In iOS, you could open a TestFlight link, and by using the app found in the App Store, you can register your place for a test version of a certain app. It overwrites the existing version of the app on your device if it’s installed, and you can then try out the latest features.

The iOS version was released back in 2014, many were waiting for a macOS version to arrive – it looked like the next obvious feature for TestFlight to appear on the Mac, but it never did, until this week.

When is it coming?

The feature is  part of Apple’s new macOS Monterrey, coming to Macs in the fall. It’s more of a refinement year this time, with small features across the board, adding up to a substantial set of improvements in many areas.

With Monterrey’s release later this year, developers can access TestFlight for Mac right now by testing the developer beta that was released last night.