> To prove that GitHub Copilot trains on non permissive licenses, we just disable any post-generation filters and see what GPL code we can generate with minimal context

This seems like a key line.

I can get my browser to output GPL code with a carefully crafted Google search query, and there might even be unlicensed use of GPL code in my browser itself. But as I understand it, as long as I don’t copy GPL code, I should be fine.

In this case they’ve disabled the GPL filter, and gotten GPL’d outputs. Fair enough. The question though: when the filter is on, can I trust it? Not sure!

Not to mention it seems like most of the blog posts and tweets about this are also very purposefully prompting to get GPL code.

Secondly, if you take this seriously you should already being doing some kind of static analysis to detect it because what if one of your employees copy/pastes some GPL code from somewhere?

It's practically a non issue that people are blowing out of proportion.

> It's practically a non issue that people are blowing out of proportion.

I don't think it is. If it is legal to input copyrighted stuff into an LLM and have the LLM magically remove the copyright, then the very concept of copyright is dead. LLMs are then a copyright-laundering machine.

Worse: if it is considered "fair use", then I don't think that I could even sell my copyrighted material with a contract that says "you are not allowed to feed it to your copyright-laundering machine". If it is fair use, anyone can do it, right?

There's two different things people are upset about here that I see.

1. The LLM might output GPL (or other restricted) code if you turn off the filters.

This one I see as a non issue.

2. The LLM benefited from GPL code and various copyrighted content in its training.

This is more complicated and for the courts to decide. My personal opinion is that as long as you as the end user are not publishing the output copyrighted content it shouldn't matter, and if you are then the owner of that copyright should pursue justice through the existing processes.

I am genuinely not sure if you just ignored all that I said or if it is your way of saying "it is fine for me if the very concept of copyright is dead".

You've said nothing of note. I honestly don't care about your personal feelings about copyright. All I was doing was clarifying the issue I was originally addressing because you replied to me about something different.

Right, at least that's clear now. You said that "It's practically a non issue that people are blowing out of proportion", I believe that the end of copyright is not a non-issue.

But yeah, ignoring the issues others have is a good way of living in a world with no issues at all.

Ofcourse you can't trust it. It's trained on code from github repos, and, suprise, people copy paste GPL code all the time into their repo which they randomly chose a permissive license for when the repo was created.

> people copy paste GPL code all the time into their repo which they randomly chose a permissive license for

Althought at that point, a well-intentioned human seeing the repo would similarly be fooled.