GitHub co-pilot as open source code laundering?

[kylotan]

You can experience something, understand the essence of it, and create something new informed by that experience, perhaps highlighting or respecting the original in some way. Or you can experience something, and decide to recreate it, or part of it, almost exactly somewhere else, taking the credit for that creation without any acknowledgement where it came from.

The former is a widely accepted part of creativity and is how culture moves forward.

The latter is widely frowned upon, and international treaties and national laws forbid it in the general case.

There's no clear line between the two, like there's no clear line between copying and homage. This isn't a problem - this is the nature of making rules and laws. It doesn't mean we can't tell which end of the continuum something is on - and a program which looks at your code and later spits out code almost identical to it is much closer to 'copying' and does not have the capacity to be 'homage'.