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Re:Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments by YeGoblynQueenne on Saturday July 03, 2021 @09:33AM (#27721523)
There's a risk of confirmation bias though, because the search was performed by the developers of the system who are strongly motivated to find no problem with their work.

I have done this to myself many, many times. I look, carefully, at length, for problems with my work until I satisfy myself that there's no obvious problem with it. Then someone else points out the obvious problem I was overlooking. Actually, this has happened often enough and it's painful enough that I learned to really look nowadays.

In the context of the search for "snippets that are verbatim from the training set" there's all sorts of things that can go wrong. The search (a regex search I think?) can be unintentionally made too weak to catch obvious cases. Or too strong, probably. The search for "snippets that are verbatim from the training set" may ignore snippets that are 80% verbatim. Or the code generated during the experiment can be generated in such a way as to only generate verbatim snippets very rarely, contrary to more typical use. And so on and so forth.

There's so many ways to fool oneself when looking for errors in one's own work.

Edit: They explain their search methodology and with only a quick look I gave it, it seems legit, but it was a quick look. The devil is in the details, yes? Maybe people who are really interested in this issue should take a closer look.

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