There is a difference between a person learning and a commercial product learning from someone else’s work, probably ignoring all the licenses.
The only leap here is the fact that the programmer has outsourced the learning to a tool that does it for them, which they then use to do their job, just as before.
Nobody is arguing against uploading code. It's about Github/Microsoft specifically.
However, at a first glance, it still feels to me like an unavoidable reality that if you publish source code it'll eventually be ingested by Copilot or whatever comes next.
I mean, for the rest of the content all the new fancy LLMs have been trained with, there wasn't a Github equivalent. They just used massive scraped dumps of text from wherever they could find them, which most definitely included trillions of lines of very much copyrighted text.
In short: not only I don't really see an issue with Copilot-like AIs learning from publicly available code (as I described in the GP comment) but I also think if you publish code anywhere at all it's inevitable that it'll end up in Copilot, regardless of where you host it. If you want to make it more expensive for Microsoft to scrape it, sure, go ahead, but I don't think it matters in the long run.
I’d be quite careful with of this view.
By your logic, it should be ok to take the Linux kernel, copy it, build it, then sell it and give nothing back to the community that built it. Then just blame it on the authors for uploading it to the internet ?