If you can get a decent facsimile of licensed code out the other end, how is it really any different from lossy compression? I doubt the courts would consider a lossy re-encode of a disney movie as free from copyright.
However, copyright isn’t cooties. If the output is not similar, then it is not infringing regardless of how much GPL’d training data was used to generate it.
No, of course not. We should probably revisit copyright law, given that it was written at a time when no-one foresaw modern AI tools, its capabilities, and its effects on creators and societies.
Transformers predict the most likely next token, the most likely next token is usually related to the surrounding context.
So yes it can create code similar to GPL code but it can only do that consistently when the GPL code is included in the context. So don’t do that.
Free Software already views all proprietary software as inherently immoral. So there is no need to take a detour of what went into making the software to reach that conclusion from that angle.
>"How much change is enough" has always been a gray area for courts and humans to decide.
But copilot has been shown to generate chunks of sufficient size and specificity that as a layman it very much feels like "copied GPL code". And my boss agrees too - we have a blanket ban on generative AI tools in our work because it's not considered worth the risk.
Only when given chinks of copyrighted code as input. I don't think anyone has demonstrated big chunks of copyrighted code in the output when copyrighted code isn't present in the query/context.
In fact, I suspect microsoft specifically filters the output for that.
That's not really Microsoft's problem as long as people aren't afraid of using Copilot to generate (potentially GPL'd) code. And from what I've generally seen from genAI discussions at work, people think very little about any legal implications.