Yes, but Co-Pilot is more like a system that has spent a lot of time learning from open source code but it has the logical reasoning ability of that code of the 12-year old who just learned about the problem yesterday that the author mentioned.

But will it be capable of generating a copyright infringement? Let's imagine I want to implement an algorithm to find the shortest path between nodes in a graph. Well I remember from my MSc that you probably need to implement it with Dijkstra's algorithm, and I've implemented this a few times over the years in kata and leetcode. Now let's say I'm programming Rust, which I don't really know the syntax for so I go read some GPL code while browsing the net for syntax.

Do I need to state that my implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm is 10% GPL, because I spent a few minutes reading syntax of a GPL file? What if someone else's copyrighted code looks 90% similar to mine, because hell there's only so many ways to implement it, can I get sued because there is 90% overlap and I might have looked at this code?

These systems aren't even capable yet of generating more than a a few functions, much less a coherent library. Even then, as they generalize more and gain more expressive power they will be less likely to copy in the training data to the output now, a possibility that I consider quite remote even given a relatively primitive Co-Pilot.

Describing an artificial intelligence algorithm as a 12-year old is a bit like describing advanced technology as magic. It kind of works as a way for people to related to it. It stops working however as soon someone start to unravel how they actually function, and at some level we understand that neither true AI or magic exist. It is just an illusion.

When you write your implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm then you hopefully using human intelligence to write it, not an illusion of intelligence. If its original then its 0% of whatever GPL file you happen to have read at a previous date. If you copy something verbatim without using human intelligence, then its 100% GPL.

True artificial intelligence == magic. if not magic then math.

Yeah, you do have to obey the terms of the license if you base it on someone else’s code even if it “is the only way to implement it.” Even if it is only a single line.

At least according to Google’s monetization policy when it comes to music.

No, you do not. Copyright protects creative expression. If there is only one way to do something, or only one good way to do something, then there is no creativity and hence no copyright.

In particular an algorithmic concept cannot be copyrighted but a description of an algorithm in code can be. I think that many programmers believe that the algorithm is the copyrightable bit because that is the “hard part” compared to say the variable names and comments which are the easy part. But copyright cares much more about the latter than loops and conditionals, which have much less creative value. Mathematical expressions cannot be copyrighted.

They're currently doing this automatically for catching exact matches, and you can turn on a setting that will suppress any suggestion that was found verbatim in the training data.

But of course this wouldn't catch copies where variable names have been changed, etc. One thing that I think would be really interesting (but hideously computationally expensive) is to compute an embedding of each chunk of the training data and then query for the k nearest neighbors when Copilot generates some code, so you can see what the closest snippets in the training data are and evaluate for yourself if they're too similar.