> Indeed, last year GitHub was said to have tuned its programming assistant to generate slight variations of ingested training code to prevent its output from being accused of being an exact copy of licensed software.
If I, a human, were to:
1. Carefully read and memorize some copyrighted code.
2. Produce new code that is textually identical to that. But in the process of typing it up, I randomly mechanically tweak a few identifiers or something to produce code that has the exact same semantics but isn't character-wise identical.
3. Claim that as new original code without the original copyright.
I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking. That reads to me exactly like deliberate copyright infringement with willful obfuscation of my infringement.
How is it any different when a machine does the same thing?
If I, a human, were to:
1. Carefully read and memorize some copyrighted code.
2. Produce new code that is textually identical to that. But in the process of typing it up, I randomly mechanically tweak a few identifiers or something to produce code that has the exact same semantics but isn't character-wise identical.
3. Claim that as new original code without the original copyright.
I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking. That reads to me exactly like deliberate copyright infringement with willful obfuscation of my infringement.
How is it any different when a machine does the same thing?