That's actually a great point. Ditto for GDocs. I've been pleasantly surprised at how good autocomplete suggestions have been in docs lately.

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that the vitriol around Copilot stems from five factors that distinguishes it from Google:

(1) The length of the suggestions alongside some of Copilot's marketing demonstrated that perhaps non-trivial replacement of engineers with AI might not be as far-fetched or far away as most people thought. Google's autocomplete has yet to make me feel replaceable.

(2) The content of the training data had a clearer intrinsic commercial value, making perceived license violations feel more 'real'.

(3) GitHub (historically) didn't have the same reputation as Google for training AI models on data uploaded to its free services. People likely (mis)placed some trust in GitHub when they uploaded code, and this backlash is part of the adjustment process.

(4) The indication that Copilot will eventually be a paid commercial service, effectively building a commercial service off the backs of millions of open source developers. While this is perfectly legal and common across all industries, it doesn't feel good.

(5) Copilot spitting out raw training data really doesn't help its image.