Every human was just trained in the same way. Why isn't this a problem for every human?
I really don't see the difference. One is an artificial neural network while the other is a biological neural network?
In my view: I don't believe a machine (at least not any we're capable of creating) can truly learn.
Copilot is a machine working on its inputs. Humans think and create. Maybe it can be argued that humans are just more complicated machines, but I don't think most people would agree with such an equivalency.
Copilot is constructed almost entirely from others' code. There's a tiny fraction of original "ai glue" in there, but the end product is arguably a derivative work of all that code it was trained on. As is its output.
It can also be argued that the AI part is really just an obfuscating copy machine. One that was created specifically for that task.
And of course, the real killing blow: if/when it reproduces training code verbatim, and you don't notice... will "copilot did it" be a valid defense in court? There are different opinions on that I guess, but no one knows for sure -- and I wouldn't take that risk.
Here GitHub (Microsoft) is charging for a product that in certain circumstances violates copyright.
Yes, if Copilot (or a human) would copy existing code, that would be a copyright violation. But none of the arguments here are about that. It's just about the learning.
I'm pretty sure I have done that by accident already in the past without noticing. This is not so unusual when you write some code with very common patterns.
And then this even can apply for code which you have not seen before. E.g. write some bubble sort function. Very likely you will find exactly the same code online.