I agree that this is different from humans learning to code from examples and reproducing some individual snippets. However, I disagree with the author’s argume

I agree that this is different from humans learning to code from examples and reproducing some individual snippets. However, I disagree with the author’s argument that it's because of humans’ ability to abstract. We actually know nothing about the AI’s ability to abstract. The real difference is that if one human can learn to code from public sources, then so can anyone else. Nobody is explicitly barred from accessing the same material. The AI, however, is kept proprietary. Nobody else can recreate it because people are explicitly barred from doing so. People cannot access the source code of the training algorithm; people cannot access enough hardware to perform the training; and most people cannot even access the training data. It may consist of repos that are technically all publicly available, but try downloading all of GitHub and see if they let you do that quickly, and/or whether you have enough disk space. This puts the owners of the AI at a significant advantage over everyone else. I think this is the core of the concern.