That quote is basically entirely nonsensical. 'copyright' hasn't decided anything (nor has any legislative body nor the courts). All that's happened is that OpenAI has put forward an argument that using large quantities of media scraped from the internet as training data is fair use. This argument for the most part does not rely on the human vs machine distinction (in fact it leans on the idea that the process is not so different from a human learning). The main place this comes up is the final test of damage to the original in terms of lost market share where it's argued that because it's a machine consuming the content there's no loss of audience to the creator (which is probably better phrased as the people training the neural net weren't going to pay for it anyway). A lot does ride on the idea that the neural net, if 'well designed', does not generally regurgitate its training data verbatim, which is in fairly hot dispute at the moment. OpenAI somewhat punts on this situation and basically says the output may infringe copyright in this case, but the copyright holder should sue whoever's generating and using the output from the net, not the person who trained and distributed the net.

Surely it could be argued that there is a loss of audience to the author. At the moment some people will read the author's code directly in order to find out how to solve a problem. In the future at least some of those people will just ask copilot to solve the problem for them.

This argument is very convenient for OpenAI.

Ctrl-c is a robot, so copyright doesn't apply to it