Microsoft in June 2022 released AI-assisted technology called Copilot that could generate its own computer code. It facilitates the work of professional programmers. As they tap the keys of their computers to put in the code, the computer would suggest readymade blocks of code which can be further added to what they have already typed.

Copilot is based on technology developed by OpenAI, San Francisco-based AI lab. It has been liberally funded by Microsoft. Copilot is jointly released by Microsoft and GitHub.

Copilot has such skills after analysing huge amount of data, say billions of lines of computer code posted to internet. It is thus based on existing work without acknowledging it. A law suit has been filed against the design technique ‘AI training’ for the first time. This technique actually builds artificial intelligence. The companies Microsoft and GitHub claim that the training system is the ‘fair use’ of the material under the copyright law. However, the arguments are yet to be legally tested. Here the idea is to train on any data anywhere for free, without any consent, for ever.

In the past, researchers have used digital text, articles, books, chat logs and other data on the internet to develop a system called GPT-3. The patterns in the text were detected. The system then becomes predictive about the next word in the sequence. When a few words were typed as input into ‘the large language model’, the system could complete the thought or idea with paragraphs of text. The system could thus write its own social media posts, speeches, news articles and poems. This led to the surprising skill AI imparts to write computer programmes learning from the large number of programmes written in the past. Some of this code comes from GitHub.