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Comment by playpause | Hacker News Reader

I was confused. "Copilot generates valid secrets" sounds like it can be used to generate new secrets that are valid in format or something. The headline is misleading, even if you personally weren't misled. The secrets are not being generated, they are real secrets appearing in generated code.

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> The secrets are not being generated

They are being generated. It's a Generative Pre-trained Transformer. It's generative. It generates things. That's what this technical term means. It's correct.

Terms have different meaning in different context, I think both terms are valid in this case, thus a qualifying word to remove ambiguity is the normal solution.

I think a generative transformer can be said to generate text. It doesn't generate new words. The words it uses to generate the text, are words copied verbatim from the input. What's emergent is the combination of those words into text.

The generated output has building blocks (characters, words) which themselves are not "generated" in the sense that they are novel.

A random number generator generates numbers. It doesn't generate the digits used to represent the random numbers. Those are taken from a set (such as 0..9) and just "used".

The issue is whether the headline can be easily misunderstood, not whether it is technically correct. Why not make it unambiguous? “GitHub Copilot output includes secrets” or something.

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