Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

I am definitely not assuming that. If we're talking about "a verbatim copy of a substantial piece of code", then that's essentially my definition of "substantial", but I specifically said "if" in that section, and my point was that IMO it's not at all the important part of the discussion; it's just a distraction (this is why I considered it unimportant to define "substantial" in that context).

FWIW, while we're further entertaining the distraction anyway, I'm not even convinced that the repeatedly-cited fast inverse square root should be eligible for copyright protection - on the grounds that the only bit of creative work in it is the choice of a magic constant, which isn't typically something that would be considered copyrightable. It would be interesting to see if a court is ever asked to rule on this specific piece of code (although I think it's basically always a sad day when we get to the point that a court is required to rule on anything, so "interesting" should not be construed as "good").

But even if they were, because the model is asked to predict what someone else would have written given the same program structure, they are far less independent from this very same structure than random snippets found on the web.

And, general structure is one of the things that distinguish fair use from plagiarism.

You can not have it both ways, mimic accurately what others would have done, and pretend you are not deriving their work (this is especially striking where people have used ML to complete damaged work of arts, more accurately than the best best forger. Who cares that the forgery was done one stroke at a time.)