If Copilot itself is infringing then so is GPT-3, DALL-E 2, NovelAI, and Stable Diffusion. There's no legal argument that would solely target one application of

If Copilot itself is infringing then so is GPT-3, DALL-E 2, NovelAI, and Stable Diffusion. There's no legal argument that would solely target one application of this technology, and you can't build generative AI using current ML tools without relying on a very large corpus of public data. All AI is built on free-riding[0]. While there is no US case law that explicitly says "training AI is fair use", the Second Circuit says that scanning books to make a search engine for them is. And the absolute worst interpretation of AI is that it's just a very well-compressed search engine index for its training set data[1]. So I'm not entirely sure if we can even thread the needle to only ban Copilot or AI training as a whole without also creating harmful precedent for search engines. Actual judges may try, I'm not sure if they'll succeed. Internationally, the EU already legalized training AI on copyrighted works[2]. So if we do win against Copilot in court, all we've really done is shift AI research over to the EU where laws are already more favorable. I fully agree that Microsoft is shoving too much liability onto their users, though. And this, again, also applies to all generative AI. My personal opinion with generative AI is that it's a nice curio, but not anywhere close to "production-ready", and Microsoft and OpenAI are trying to sell us on a lie that it's better than it really is. [0] This also implies that all y'all playing around with image generators are just as much of a freeloader as Microsoft is. [1] This viewpoint is also called "compressionism". [2] This was part of the most recent EU Copyright Directive update - the one that added a de facto upload filtering requirement. It also added a copyright exception for museums and historical preservation.