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I read on decrypt.co:

Data from GitHub reveals that "41% of all code right now is AI generated" Mostaque remarked.

Is is true that 41% of all code on GitHub is AI-generated? They don't provide any reference supporting that claim.

That sounds rather high to me, unless perhaps a small fraction of repo or orgs are dumping some massive amount of possibly broken AI-generated code, which would boost that percentage.

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    The quote (from an AI company) goes on to say "a testament to AI's growing popularity over cryptocurrency". Chalk and cheese, or chalking one up by grasping at cheese straws? Commented Oct 10, 2023 at 21:58
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    The thing about GitHub is that you can create thousands of accounts and fill their quota with meaningless projects, be they AI generated or not even software at all. MS doesn't seem too concerned with that for the moment. Commented Oct 10, 2023 at 22:19
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    Are they having false positives from auto-generated boilerplate code, possibly? That’s the first thing that comes to mind, and I’d argue it’s not the same as AI-generated. Would be interesting to see if they ran their heuristics on all commits prior to the release of ChatGPT/etc Commented Oct 10, 2023 at 22:46
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    I would say that "41% of all code on GitHub is AI-generated" is not the claim. It's more likely intended to be that 41% of recent code on GitHub is AI-generated, with how recent not being specified. Commented Oct 10, 2023 at 22:47
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    Not authoritative sources, but a comment on reddit.com/r/github/comments/14qwhem/… and a comment on linkedin.com/posts/… suggest it may be a misinterpretation of information about the GitHub CoPilot study group. I'm inclined to believe them due to the lack of any other sources claiming 41% of code is AI-generated. Commented Oct 10, 2023 at 23:04

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It's likely a misinterpretation. Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI, in an interview at Morgan Stanley TMT Conference in March 2023 spoke about some statistics they saw for users of GitHub Copilot (a development tool that uses AI to provide code suggestions):

We're now seeing the developers using GitHub Copilot are 55% more productive with it on tasks, and that's sort of measured by independent studies. And 40% of the code they're checking in is now AI-generated and unmodified.

So they're saying that 40% of new code from Copilot users is AI-generated, not 40% of all new code and definitely not 40% of all code.

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