Copyrightest

The most salient difference is that it's impossible to tell if an LLM is plagiarizing, whereas Xeroxing something implies specific intent to copy. It makes no sense to push liability onto LLM users.

The big difference between people reading code and LLMs reading code is that people have legal liability and LLMs do not. You can't sue an LLM for copyright infringement, and it's almost impossible for users to tell when it happens.

BTW in 2023 I watched ChatGPT spit out hundreds of lines of F# verbatim from my own GitHub. A lot of people had this experience with GitHub Copilot. "98.7% unique" is still a lot of infringement.

One problem with this is that there isn't really a "current prompt" that completely describes the current source code; each source file is accompanied by a full chat log, including false starts and misunderstandings. It's sort of like reading a git history instead of the actual file.

I think the most salient point about Factorio here is that its CPU-side native core was largely hammered out by 2018, most of the development since then has been in Lua or GPU-side. The devs could be quite confident their code didn't have any unhandled null pointers. That's not really the case for Chromium or (God help us) WebKit.