Only if you push it into a corner, at which point you may just as well go to the repo and copy-paste the code you're trying to reproduce.

Take a look at the prompts people use in these examples. They are always so contrived. Sure if you ask it to "Take this function exactly as it is from this file at this repo and output it without changes" it can do that.

Is the contrivedness relevant to the legal question? It shows the model contains the copyrighted content and can reproduce it on demand.

Yes. Courts will generally assign blame to whoever did the thing that caused a breach of the law, which in this case is the user.

In other words, law isn’t a programming language.

My brain contains loads of copyrighted info. And if I exactly reproduce it from memory, it's copyright infringement. But if I come up with my own work, even if using that copyrighted info to learn from, it isn't infringement.

I don't understand why people keep comparing humans and computers. The law does not treat machinery equal to a human.

You can't really say that. All this needs to be tested in court and see what definitions of what end up winning and setting precendent.

It can go either way.

How would you even know where it came from? If I commit some code, you’d have no idea if I came up with it myself or if AI generated it.

And why would it matter?

Do you think the prompt "sparse matrix transpose, cs_" is contrived?

Maybe? I have no idea what that prompt even means.