It would be an essential feature, imo, to have this 'near-verbatim check' for copyleft code.
Overall it feels like it's a bit too much of specialized learning on GPL/Copyleft code to be fair. It's not like a human that reads some source code and gets an idea how it works. It's really learning code from scratch on Copyleft code, without which it would likely perform much worse and not generate a number of examples. It's not just copy-paste, but it's closer on the spectrum to copy paste than just super-abstract inspiration to feel fair.
As others have said, I don't think it would be fine (specially from big companies pov.) to decompile proprietary code (or just grab publicly available but illegal to reproduce code) and have AIs learn from that in a way that seems different in scope and ability to human research and reverse engineering.
I think we need a good tradeoff that isn't ludditism (that would reject a benefit for us all, i.e. that is good for everyone), but that still promotes and maintains open source software. In this case it's really a public "good" that's being seized and commercialized, that doesn't seem quite right: make copilot public, or use only permitted code (or share your revenue with developers -- although that would seem more complicated and up to each copyright holder to re-license for this usage). I remember not long ago MS declaring Open Source was a kind of "Cancer", now they're relying on it to sell their programming AIs. I personally think Open Source is quite the opposite of cancer, it is usually an unmitigated social good.
Much of the same could be said for the case of artists an generative AI art.
And this isn't even starting on how we move forward as a society that has highly automated most jobs and needs to distribute the resources and wealth in a good way to enable greatest wellbeing for all beings.
Overall it feels like it's a bit too much of specialized learning on GPL/Copyleft code to be fair. It's not like a human that reads some source code and gets an idea how it works. It's really learning code from scratch on Copyleft code, without which it would likely perform much worse and not generate a number of examples. It's not just copy-paste, but it's closer on the spectrum to copy paste than just super-abstract inspiration to feel fair.
As others have said, I don't think it would be fine (specially from big companies pov.) to decompile proprietary code (or just grab publicly available but illegal to reproduce code) and have AIs learn from that in a way that seems different in scope and ability to human research and reverse engineering.
I think we need a good tradeoff that isn't ludditism (that would reject a benefit for us all, i.e. that is good for everyone), but that still promotes and maintains open source software. In this case it's really a public "good" that's being seized and commercialized, that doesn't seem quite right: make copilot public, or use only permitted code (or share your revenue with developers -- although that would seem more complicated and up to each copyright holder to re-license for this usage). I remember not long ago MS declaring Open Source was a kind of "Cancer", now they're relying on it to sell their programming AIs. I personally think Open Source is quite the opposite of cancer, it is usually an unmitigated social good.
Much of the same could be said for the case of artists an generative AI art.
And this isn't even starting on how we move forward as a society that has highly automated most jobs and needs to distribute the resources and wealth in a good way to enable greatest wellbeing for all beings.