Part of the copilot discussion was about patents rather than copyright, which doesn't apply to text. Also the concern is less about the legal implications of Co

Part of the copilot discussion was about patents rather than copyright, which doesn't apply to text. Also the concern is less about the legal implications of Copilot itself but those for developers using its output, which are largely the same concerns why we frown on people copy-pasting code from StackOverflow or random Google results (other than quality). The copyright problem with Copilot is not just the license of the corpus it was trained on, it's also that in many cases it reproduces source material verbatim with no indication that this is happening. If GPT were to be used to produce fiction books, poetry or lyrics (not simply as an artistic experiment), I'm sure its output would undergo similar scrutiny from people in the respective industries. As it stands, for text it's more likely to see use to generate rough drafts for news articles and blog posts which would need a lot of editing to make useful. It might still reproduce writing styles or idioms but neither of these are subject to copyright in much the same way as lines of code. Making the output of Copilot useful is more challenging, even if you could magically avoid the legal minefield its training data poses. The quality is hit or miss, but it can introduce subtle bugs and because it doesn't understand the code it generates, you now have to understand it for it, which can be difficult because you didn't even come up with it and there's no-one you can ask.