That license is granted to the community, but per the linked Terms of Service, the company gets a slightly different license (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice... ; scroll to "Subscriber Content"). Emphasis on:

> ... and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to ...

That license comes with obligations that the AI companies aren't following.

Its highly debatable if that's true.

The cc lience only applies to the presentation of the information, it doesn't apply to the factual content of the information. Which part openAI used is a matter of much controversy.

Cursor once wrote a comment, I prompted then « what is the source of the comment » and it replaced the comment with a stackoverflow url in which the page contained the said comment verbatim. I didn’t expect cursor to paste the full url

Well.. if given the right prompt.. it will effectively fully reproduce a stack overflow post in it's original form then there is no controversy and we can all see plainly what's going on behind the scenes.

Will it actually? There have certainly been incidents of that sort of thing, but from what i understand people have not been able to reliably make that happen for specific posts .

Define "it."

And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration."

It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach.

The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.

Sure, but copying 1 or 2 sentences verbatim into a long program probably isn't enough to win a copyright suit (de minimis). Or at least it would be pretty grey. Similarly, the simpler the program, the less likely the creative intent shines through.

(Mostly im just trying to say these things depend on the details, and the anti-AI crowd tend to handwave the details away. They might still be right, but its far from an obvious slam dunk)

A distinction that is unfortunately as important as it is meaningless