"If you ignore the part where it blatantly violates copyright, then it doesn't blatantly violate copyright" -- I really don't know what to answer to that. I hav

"If you ignore the part where it blatantly violates copyright, then it doesn't blatantly violate copyright" -- I really don't know what to answer to that. I have already argued that it is very easy to get it to regurgitate existing code, hardly an exceptional situation, and as usual, users will get zero feedback when it happens. I also don't see an easy way out of this situation; this "overfit vs something that is useful" is basically the eternal problem not only in ML but almost in every area of modeling; even the simple hack of putting a copyright/similarity checker on top of it is a harder problem than the model itself (detecting verbatim copies alone is not going to allay my fears). And the Photoshop analogy _still doesn't work_ even if I were to assume what you suggest, because Photoshop was _not_ built using my artwork. They didn't even look at it while building my artwork. Copilot _is_ built using my copyrighted code. You cannot simply claim that despite being literally built from my code, it is free from my copyright, because that's already assuming the consequent, or what we are discussing here. Why would their transformation be any different than an advanced compression algorithm? Why would Copilot "know" but another compression algorithm with a 5GB dictionary "not know"? Why should its 5GB dictionary not immediately be a violation since it is built from a lot of copyrighted works? Why would "knowing" magically release from copyright a software built _from_ other copyrighted software? This is already a shitton of assumptions that are not justified in any way, and by driving the conversation with works like "learning", "understand", "know", etc. you are just framing it in a one-sided way. And the point is that you cannot simply ask those questions about Photoshop itself, because no one's copyrighted artwork was used during its construction. There's no discussion about the merits of Photoshop code "learning" from the artwork because there is no learning whatsoever. To try to jungle both things as the "same" is intentionally misleading. The entire reason things like "clean room reverse engineering" exist is to allay fears. You don't need clean room to avoid coypright issues, and at the same time it doesn't fully protect you from copyright issues. But if you did use a clean room approach, you at least can demonstrate that you were not looking at the original code when you were implementing your version of it, which is likely to score big points in a trial, _even_ if the code ends up being somewhat similar. Here, Copilot has literally been built using a large corpus of existing copyrighted code, and it stores it with its clearly "super-human photographic memory" (i.e. a huge on-disk database whose size we cannot even estimate). There's simply no way to use a defense like the "clean room" defense. Thus even the _slightest_ similarity to my existing code is extremely likely to be regarded as a copyright violation.