Comment by fwlr

If it was possible to point to where the code is actually stored in Copilot (i.e. run strings on the server and it spits out the copylefted code), I would be a lot more sympathetic to the view that LLMs are stealing code. Even if you decode the weights from floats to strings, you won't find the strings of code stored anywhere. It's probably not correct to say it's "learning" from code the same way humans are, but it is "learning" from code in the way LLMs learn.

Fundamentally it seems to me that Copilot truly does synthesise code from some store of knowledge (even if it's hard to understand what this store of knowledge is), and the problem is that it's synthesising code identical to existing code. There are legal tools and also rhetoric that are designed for dealing with this problem of "synthesising something that is identical to an existing thing", and it's different tools and rhetoric from the ones we have for dealing with the problem of "stealing or copying existing things". It's valid to have an issue with with Copilot ingesting your code, but unfortunately people are largely using tools and rhetoric from the latter category to approach the issue, and that slight misapplication is causing their issues to fall on deaf ears a lot of the time.