And it seems pretty clear to me that it is fair use, because it's not merely reproducing or creating a derivative work, but actually extracting patterns and mod

And it seems pretty clear to me that it is fair use, because it's not merely reproducing or creating a derivative work, but actually extracting patterns and modeling the works in a way that is intended to be used to create new and unrelated works. The fact that an occasional piece of code here and there might be reproduced verbatim is no different than e.g. Cliffs Notes occasionally quoting a passage, and Cliffs Notes are a well established case of fair use that to me, at least, seems even closer to "the line" than Copilot or Stable Diffusion. FTA: "On the other hand, maybe you’re a fan of Copi­lot who thinks that AI is the future and I’m just yelling at clouds. First, the objec­tion here is not to AI-assisted cod­ing tools gen­er­ally, but to Microsoft’s spe­cific choices with Copi­lot. We can eas­ily imag­ine a ver­sion of Copi­lot that’s friend­lier to open-source devel­op­ers—for instance, where par­tic­i­pa­tion is vol­un­tary, or where coders are paid to con­tribute to the train­ing cor­pus." This is the same argument that people use about Stable Diffusion, and it's kinda meh to me...I guess it'd be nice to allow people to opt-out, like Stable Diffusion is doing with their next versions, especially since a negligible percentage of people will do so and it won't affect the models at all. But yes, it basically is yelling at clouds. Opt-in would cripple models, and some people would make them anyways and just keep them secret, which is worse for the world. And at the end of the day, this really does just seem to me like a fair use of stuff that you've published on the Internet for anyone with a browser to look at. The AI models of the future are going to gobble the whole net up, and if you don't want them ingesting your stuff and learning from it, then you just shouldn't make it freely available. If OpenAI/GitHub/MS really wanted to get ahead of this and head off any potential legal conflict, they could always just open source the models and weights, which would be in line with the name "OpenAI"...it would be a minor project to scrape all the correct headers to add to a license file(s), but negligible compared to the many millions of dollars spent on training.