"[...] where the misuse of AI for spambots, surveillance, propaganda, and other nefarious purposes is already a major societal concern [...]"

I'm curious what he will do and whether for example he approves of the code laundering CoPilot tool. I also hope he'll resist being used as an academic promoter of such tools, explicitly or implicitly (there are many ways, his mere association with the company buys goodwill already).

what's wrong with copilot as a concept and as the concrete implementation?

it's a fancy autocomple. we had stack overflow based autocomplete before. this got a bigger training data set.

The objection here is that its training was based on code on github without paying any attention to the license of that code. It’s generally considered ok for people to learn from code and then produce new code without the new code being considered a derived work of what they learned from (I’m not sure if there is a specific fair use clause covering this). But it’s not obvious that copilot should be able to ignore the licenses of the code it was trained on, especially given it sometimes outputs code from the training set verbatim. One could imagine a system very similar to copilot which reads in GPL or proprietary code and writes functionally equivalent code while claiming it’s not a derived work of the original and so isn’t subject to its licensing constraints.