For example, I know artists who are vehemently against DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. and regard it as stealing, but they view Copilot and GPT-3 as merely useful tools. I also know software devs who are extremely excited about AI art and GPT-3 but are outraged by Copilot.
For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it.
Copilot on Python makes me x5 more productive. I used Copilot in Beta for a year and continue paying for it now.
For example: I can make a command line data wrangling script for a novel data set in a few minutes with a few prompts with full complement of extras (proper argparse parameters with sane defaults, ready to import etc etc). # reasonable comments included for free as well
Before copilot I could do the same in about 20-30minutes but my code would be a mess with little commenting. I would spend 30-60 minutes just looking up docs for various libraries.
Now without Copilot, if all I was doing was writing data wrangling scripts 4 hours a day I could approach this Copilot like productivity for a single task.
However with Copilot I can switch problem domains very quickly and remain productive.
Interestingly, on something like CSS or Javascript - Copilot is helping only slightly, maybe because my local training set is insufficient and my web-dev prompts are too generic.
So I think AI can be fantastic force multiplier in a skillset that you already are reasonably familiarity. I can handle the 5-10% wtf Python code that Copilot produces.
I do not particularly like copyrights and do wish Copilot had been trained on private Microsoft code as well.