I generally agree with your underlying point concerning attribution and intellectual property ownership but your follow-up comment reframes your initial statement: LLMs generate recombinations of code from code created by humans, without giving credit.

Stack Overflow offers access to other peoples’ work, and developers combined those snippets and patterns into their own projects. I suspect attribution is low.

Stack Overflow deals with that issue by having a license agreement.

To be fair, their license agreement is pretty much impossible to enforce.

GitHub, Bitbucket, GCE, AWS…all have licensing agreements for user contributions which the user flagged as “public” so I’m not exactly clear of your point if you are holding SO up as a bastion of intellectual property rights different from the other places LLM training sets were scraped from.

I was not the person that introduced SO to the discussion.