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Comment by fooster | Hacker News Reader

That is absolutely not my experience at all and wish people would stop with the hysterical hyperbole. The tool typically produces code that would only make sense in my codebase because it uses internal types which only make sense in my code base. That is not and cannot be copyright infringement.

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Sure, it's clever enough to swap identifiers correctly, but the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere, at times.

It's not unlike copying code from stack overflow and swapping the identifiers around.

How did you learn the shape of the code and techniques that you recognized? By looking at other code? Are you violating copyright when you are writing similar code yourself?

> By looking at other code? Are you violating copyright when you are writing similar code yourself?

It's certainly possible. Back when Phoenix reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS using published sources with a restrictive license, they did it by having one team read the sources and write a very detailed specification of everything that happens there, and then another team used that spec to write new code from scratch. They did it that way because if the first team were to write the code themselves, it is quite likely that the result would be legally considered derived work.

> By looking at other code? Are you violating copyright when you are writing similar code yourself?

In that order likely a violation, but it depends on the concrete case, always.

From decades of looking at interesting code.

I take care to attempt to not duplicate code; it's why don't use copilot.

> the shape of the code and techniques it uses were familiar to me from elsewhere.

Isn't this exactly what you'd expect an AI coder to do?

That's precisely the problem with it. AI, as it is, can be considered a lossy compression technique with multiple document recovery, convolution and interpolation ability.

Can't humans be considered a lossy compression technique with multiple document recovery, convolution and interpolation ability?

What is the specific difference?

100% agree. This matches my actual usage of github copilot. All the drama around it seems to just be mostly for headlines to fuel the outrage machine.

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