There is nothing far fetched about this. GNU is an ideological organization and their ideology is "free software." Free software exists because of the copyright system. Now imagine if someone can just fork your GPL licensed software and distribute it under an incompatible license, and when you go to court, the judge tells you to punch sand because your codebase is all AI generated and therefore not copyrighted.

I am not saying this is not what will happen — the actual law seems to be still up in the air. But if it does happen it will be an existential threat to the GNU and the whole free software ecosystem.

I don't think the concerns are far fetched at all. Look at how image models spit out copyrighted stuff all the time. Midjourney has a bizarre EULA clause that if you use it to generate images that violate copyright and _they_ get sued, they can hold you liable downstream. Which is wild to me -- just don't train on things you don't own and this is not a problem!

In images it's much more _obvious_, but I think code is very likely to have similar problems. Like, websites that an LLM spits out are often very very similar. It wouldn't be shocking to me if some of the code in the training set was trained off GPL code, and there are small GPL violations all over the place.

They still allow LLM-generated code for tests, LLM-assisted debugging, bug discovery and code reviews. It doesn't seem so.

It's far-fetched that the GNU project is authentically concerned about software licensing?

The stance may be reasonable, but the reasoning is not clear to me and the limit does sesm to suggest copyright concerns that are, as you say, far fetched.