[chii]

> It doesn't understand that the two are equivalent.

it doesn't need to understand the way a human might do the understanding.

The pattern that the LLM managed to extract could include the structure, rather than the pure text. And in reproducing the structure, the LLM can replace the variable names but keep the structure intact.

I am not sure if copilot is able to do this, but chatGPT was somewhat able to (if imperfectly at the moment).

[belorn]

Copying a piece of code and changing the variable names is still a copy. It is similar to how copying a piece of music and changing the pitch/volume/any other attribute would still be a copy of the original music.

The thing that the LLM need to do is to convince a judge/jury that it has not created a copy, and that it operate differently from a transformation.