Flutterby™! : Github Copilot investigation

This is fantastic: Github Copilot investigation:

If Microsoft and OpenAI chose to use these repos sub­ject to their respec­tive open-source licenses, Microsoft and OpenAI would’ve needed to pub­lish a lot of attri­bu­tions, because this is a min­i­mal require­ment of pretty much every open-source license. Yet no attri­bu­tions are appar­ent.

There­fore, Microsoft and OpenAI must be rely­ing on a fair-use argu­ment. In fact we know this is so, because for­mer GitHub CEO Nat Fried­man claimed dur­ing the Copi­lot tech­ni­cal pre­view that “train­ing [machine-learn­ing] sys­tems on pub­lic data is fair use”.

But a hell of a lot of that code is GPL or LGPL licensed and one can apparently recreate it with the right prompts...