[tbrownaw]

> Copilot is the perfect machine for clean room design and license/copyright laundering.

How's that? The entire point of a cleanroom re-implementation is that the, er, entities (historically, human programmers) writing the code have provably not seen the code being copied. Which is rather contrary to how copilot has seen approximately all the code.

[jfmc]

From my point of view, the 'clean' part of 'cleanroom' means erasing all traceability to the original product. Not seeing the code is a good way to do that. But if you are a machine it is easy unsee whatever you want (e.g., identifiers, copyright forms, authors). Copilot (or any other system that learns from code) have one of these three evolution paths here to move forward: - includes some sort of traceability (not usable for laundering then) - becomes very good at "unseeing" the origin - do not learn from code but rediscovers algorithms (without recognition to humans)

[alkonaut]

If you have a verbatim nontrivial snippet of a codebase, how does it matter whether it was copy pasted or copiloted? It can’t give “deniability” just because it looks like a black box.

[trasz]

> But if you are a machine it is easy unsee whatever you want (e.g., identifiers, copyright forms, authors).

Like with sed(1)? It’s still just source obfuscation.