That’s a great question, and is why we have these debates, and have courts to adjudicate disputes. I don’t have all the answers, but the gap between these different behaviors seems pretty wide to me.
Autocomplete doesn’t really work until you start typing. The fact that my phone recognizes that I’m starting to type a word and the IDE offers the most statistically likely choice for me to accept doesn’t make those words its own. Same with autocomplete on a phone or in a word processor when entering sentences.
FWIW the Copyright Office, for its part, recognizes that AI generated code is mechanically generated and its opinion is that it’s not copyrightable.
But that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about attribution and when it becomes important. To me the metaprogramming/codegen case is different because of the nature of the mechanism, particularly if you wrote the inputs that the IDE transformed on your behalf.
Is a series of matrix multiplications on a token vector not a mechanical transformation?
Where is the point where you start to anthropomorphize it?