[orbital-decay]

The debate over Copilot is not new either: at launch, it kept suggesting Carmack's fast square root code. (which got patched a day or so after). The recent shenanigans were about the code that was published under wrong license by third parties, and then picked up by Copilot.

Any overfitting (reproducing the training data verbatim) is not intended and is avoided as much as possible. But it's inevitable sometimes, and is a worse problem in code than art, as you have no way of knowing if it reproduced some private code verbatim.

And no, it's certainly not the entire debate, many people are also afraid that their job will be automated. Which is a silly assumption in case of Copilot as well as with image gen models - it stems from the misunderstanding of what it can and can't do, what's fundamentally possible with it in the future etc.

The moral panic is strong, but I have the feeling that it's amplified by social media without really being substantiated. The advent of CGI was the same, it just was more quiet due to the lack of social media at the time.