> Nobody has every detail of all of them memorized.
That was never the requirement, you've made it up to avoid addressing the real argument
> So if copying a useful piece of code from Stack Overflow has always been acceptable,
Not really, the thing you partially hide in "useful" is the quality assessment. Blindly copy&pasting code was "never" "acceptable"
> why would asking a machine to produce that code be fundamentally different?
Because the previous premise is wrong, but also this one - it will be different code with different tradeoffs, at least try to make any argument why the situations are identical
That was never the requirement, you've made it up to avoid addressing the real argument
> So if copying a useful piece of code from Stack Overflow has always been acceptable,
Not really, the thing you partially hide in "useful" is the quality assessment. Blindly copy&pasting code was "never" "acceptable"
> why would asking a machine to produce that code be fundamentally different?
Because the previous premise is wrong, but also this one - it will be different code with different tradeoffs, at least try to make any argument why the situations are identical