There is a difference, and AI companies understand it very well. All of them prohibit you from using their model to train other AI models. Microsoft takes it a step further and even prohibits you from trying to discover how the models work.

No human, however powerful, can prevent you from looking at their actions and learning from them. You can look at Obama's speeches for instance and learn how to craft certain messages for your own speeches. Nothing he can do to stop you from doing that.

And that is the key difference: AI models have been designed to privatize the process of learning, wherein they have unlimited freedom to learn from any human's work without compensating them from it, but humans or even other AI models cannot learn from an AI model.

This distinction IMO removes any right that the AI companies have to pretend that their models are people. They're not, the actions of the AI companies themselves show that.