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This is why its astonishing to me that AI has passed any legal department. I regularly see AI output large chunks of code that are 100% plagiarised from a project - its often not hard to find the original source by just looking up snippets of it. 100s of lines of code just completely stolen

Ai doesn't actually wash licenses, it literally can't. Companies are just assuming they're above the law

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It's not about following the law — it's about avoiding penalties in practice.

Did they get penalised? Is anyone getting penalised? No? Then there's no reason for legal to block it.

And remember when you put the GPL license on a project, that's only worth your willingness to sue anyone who violates, otherwise your project is public domain.

If the LLM was trained on any GPL licenced code then there is an argument that all output is GPL too, legal departments should be worried.

I am not aware of any argument for that. Even if the output is a derivative work (which is very doubtful) that would make it a breach of copyright to distribute it under another license, not automatically apply the GPL.

If the output is a derivative work of the input then you would be in breach of copyright if the training data is GPL, MIT, proprietary - anything other than public domain or equivalent.

> by just looking up snippets of it

a fix might be for ai to cite sources accurately.

> Companies are just assuming they're above the law

and so far they appear to be above the law.

This is oft-repeated but never backed up by evidence. Can you share the snippet that was plagiarized?

I can't offer an example of code, but considering researchers were able to cause models to reproduce literary works verbatim, it seems unlikely that a git repository would be materially different.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorizati...

Assuming that even works from a researcher's perspective, it's working back from a specific goal. There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out.

It's a convenient criticism of LLMs, but a wrong one. We need to do better.

> There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out.

That’s not true. I’ve seen it happen and remember reports where it was obvious it happened (and trivial to verify) because the LLM reproduced the comments with source information.

Either way, plagiarism doesn’t require one to copy 100% verbatim (otherwise every plagiarist would easily be off the hook). It still counts as plagiarism if you move a space or rename a variable.

https://xcancel.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554

https://xcancel.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

> We need to do better.

I agree. We have to start by not dismissing valid criticisms by appealing to irrelevant technicalities which don’t excuse anything.

Ok you win.

You should take your findings to the large media organizations including NYT who've been trying to prove this for years now. Your discovery is probably going to win them their case.

Why so cynic? This is a serious issue. And media coverage has nothing to do with the immoral state of the art of ignoring copyrights.

I don't know code examples, but this tracks, for me. Anytime I have an agent write something "obvious" and crazy hard -- say a new compiler for a new language? Golden. I ask it to write a fairly simple stack invariant version of an old algorithm using a novel representation (topology) using a novel construction (free module) ... zip. It's 200loc, and after 20+ attempts, I've given up.

These arguments absolutely infuriate me. You're code is not that unique. Lots of people write the same snippet everyday and have no idea that somebody else just wrote the same thing.

It's such a crock that you can somehow claim you're the only person who can write that snippet and now everyone else owes you something. No. No they don't. Get over it.

Writing a book is different. Lifting pages or chapters is different because it's much harder for two people to write the exact same thing. Code is code, it follows a formula and a everyone uses that formula.

Writing an exact copy of a nontrivial function by mistake is so rare that i've never seen it happen in 20 years of programming

While this is from 2022, here you go:

https://x.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554

I'm sure if someone prompts correctly, they can do the same thing today. LLMs can't generate something they don't know.

That you had to look and find this from 2022 proves my point..

Nope. That was a handy bookmark. I keep a list of these incidents, and other things:

https://notes.bayindirh.io/notes/Lists/Discussions+about+Art...

I have another handful of links to add to this list. Had no time to update recently.

It happens often enough that the company I work for has set up a presubmit to check all of the AI generated and AI assisted code for plagiarism (which they call "recitation"). I know they're checking the code for similarity to anything on GitHub, but they could also be checking against the model's their training corpus.

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