It's also not a commercially released product yet, but a technical preview, so uncovering and addressing issues like that is exactly what pre-release versions are for.
I'd say it succeeded greatly in sparking a discussion about these issues.
> ... will you defend it just because I claim it is a tech preview?
That's a straw man argument and you know it.
Code snippets are in no way shape or form comparable to entire software products and CoPilot neither installs anything nor is its intention to knowingly violate licences or copyright law.
Disingenuous straw manning like this doesn't help the discussion and only serves to distract from actual issues.
It is absolutely not in my opinion and that particular idea did not cross my mind at all so the idea that I knew it is patently double false.
But let me try to be constructive here and be even more precise:
Would it be OK if I launched a tech preview of my AI poem writer companion that would copy lines but also complete stanzas from famous poets, rock bands and singer-songwriters?
> Would it be OK if I launched a tech preview of my AI poem writer companion that would copy lines but also complete stanzas from famous poets, rock bands and singer-songwriters?
Yes it would be if it only happened ~0.1% of the time and if quoting verbatim wasn't the intended function of the system but merely a side-effect. In fact, that's what artists sometimes do deliberately.
It's what happens with other GANs as well and all that needs to happen is to educate users about the possibility of this. As long as you don't take ownership of the output produced by your AI (and neither do Microsoft), it's at the discretion of the user what they use the generated content for and in which context.
It has been demonstrated that training data can be extracted from any large NLP model [0] so this wouldn't come as a surprise either.
It's also not a commercially released product yet, but a technical preview, so uncovering and addressing issues like that is exactly what pre-release versions are for.
I'd say it succeeded greatly in sparking a discussion about these issues.