To understand if Copilot is infringing the licenses of codes used in its training data we have to get into the details of what it does and how it works. We can'

To understand if Copilot is infringing the licenses of codes used in its training data we have to get into the details of what it does and how it works. We can't make a general statement for any code generation software that was trained on open source code. It is a possible that at some point maybe even in not so distant future we will have ML models so good they can understand abstract concepts, learn and invent new algorithms and implementations by reading code. Such a ML model can be argued is learning similar to a human and hence it's not infringing any copyrights because it's not copying implementations it's learning concepts and ideas. But we are not there yet. When we get there we will know. Because at that point Siri would be able to have seamless conversations with you. At least half the jobs would disappear in favor of robots in a short time. The world would be a different place. Let's talk about what Copilot actually can do. It can copy snippets of code from Github while changing variable names. It can autocomplete trivial boilerplate code. If it's automagically generating a function for you that actually does something useful like sorting an array, you can be absolutely sure that it's just copy pasting it from an existing repo with some cosmetic changes.