As a human programmer, I've also been trained on thousands of lines of other people's code. Is there anything new here, from a code copying perspective? Aren't I liable if segments of my own code exactly match someone else's code, even if I didn't knowingly copy/paste it?
Well to me those are fundamental questions that need to be addressed one way or the other. Are systems like GPT-x basically plagiarising (doesn't matter the nature of the output, be it prose, code, or audio-visual) or are the results so transformative in nature that they can be considered to be "original work"?
In other words, are these systems to be treated like students that learned to perform the task they do from a collection of source material, or are they to be viewed as sophisticated databases that "just" perform context-sensitive retrieval?
These are interesting and important questions and I'm glad someone is publicly asking them and that many of us at least think about them.
