The recent explosion of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot has supercharged the assistance available to programmers. However, AI assistants may strip out comments embedded in code to convey copyright and attribution guidelines, leaving human coders none the wiser yet still on the hook legally for intellectual property infringement.
To combat this problem, computer science and engineering researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have developed CodeIPPrompt, the first automated testing platform to evaluate how much language models generate IP-violating code. The team includes Ning Zhang and Chenguang Wang, both assistant professors; Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, a professor; Zhiyuan Yu, a graduate student in Zhang's lab and first author on the paper; and Chaowei Xiao, an assistant professor of computer science at Arizona State University.
