> The question remains if LLM-assisted design is actually ‘clean’ or not
I genuinely don't understand how one could possibly make that argument.
The entire point of clean-room design is to kill every possibility of copyright infringement before it even starts, by completely separating the source and destination. Everyone who has ever read the copyrighted source is considered "tainted" and may not ever contribute any code to the "clean" destination. The readers and writers are two completely distinct teams, with only the known-clean specification passing between them.
LLMs, on the other hand, are fundamentally nothing more than a "code blender". You mix together giant piles of "tainted" code, and then statistically pull some combined fragments out of it. Following the clean-room legal argument, it should be treated as if everything coming out of it is tainted. There is, by definition, absolutely zero separation between input and output - and the early models verbatim reproducing popular F/LOSS code made that pretty obvious. LLMs are the literal opposite of a clean-room design!
Granted, going for the clean-room approach is overkill - and intentionally so. It is the nuclear option chosen when you believe the risk of getting sued is substantial. It is perfectly possible to write non-infringing code without using a clean-room approach, it is just a lot harder to defend in court when you get sued - be it justifiably or not. But "LLMs are non-clean-room non-infringing" is quite a different argument from "LLMs are clean-room, therefore non-infringing".
I genuinely don't understand how one could possibly make that argument.
The entire point of clean-room design is to kill every possibility of copyright infringement before it even starts, by completely separating the source and destination. Everyone who has ever read the copyrighted source is considered "tainted" and may not ever contribute any code to the "clean" destination. The readers and writers are two completely distinct teams, with only the known-clean specification passing between them.
LLMs, on the other hand, are fundamentally nothing more than a "code blender". You mix together giant piles of "tainted" code, and then statistically pull some combined fragments out of it. Following the clean-room legal argument, it should be treated as if everything coming out of it is tainted. There is, by definition, absolutely zero separation between input and output - and the early models verbatim reproducing popular F/LOSS code made that pretty obvious. LLMs are the literal opposite of a clean-room design!
Granted, going for the clean-room approach is overkill - and intentionally so. It is the nuclear option chosen when you believe the risk of getting sued is substantial. It is perfectly possible to write non-infringing code without using a clean-room approach, it is just a lot harder to defend in court when you get sued - be it justifiably or not. But "LLMs are non-clean-room non-infringing" is quite a different argument from "LLMs are clean-room, therefore non-infringing".