Indeed, but it’s a much more legally dubious proposition when it comes to entire repos. A repo has more potentially creative structure for copyright to attach to. For example the class graph, or the filesystem layout are creative decisions that could potentially be protected. Current LLMs are nowhere near powerful enough to reimplement an entire repo without violating copyright.
For an individual function I can totally believe GPT4 could strip creative expression from it today. For example you could ask it to give a detailed description of a function in English, and then feed that English description back in (in a new session) and ask it to generate a code based upon the description.
Sounds like clean room, and if you can do that for GPL code, you can also do that for proprietary code, which is fair in a sense. Or maybe the question is whether you can re-label the code so written as GPL or MIT ......Or, you should let GPT pick a license that it likes.
Reimplementing would also help with training data, it's a way of extracting the idea without copying the original form. Works even better on images with variations, you generate the style from image A with content composition from image B, thus extracting the style without the exact expression.
For an individual function I can totally believe GPT4 could strip creative expression from it today. For example you could ask it to give a detailed description of a function in English, and then feed that English description back in (in a new session) and ask it to generate a code based upon the description.