Not OP, but I also don’t think it’s the same thing. But even if it were, the consequences are nowhere near the same.

A person might be able to learn to replicate an artist’s style, given enough practice and patience, but it would take them a long time, and the most “damage” they could do with that, is create new content at roughly the same rate as the original creator.

It would take an AI infinitely less time to acquire that same skill, and infinitely less time to then create that content. So given those factors, I think there’s an enormous difference between 1 person learning to copy your skill, or a company that does it as a business model.

Btw, if you didn’t know it yet - search engines don’t need to create a large language model in order to find web content. They’ve been working fine (one night even say Better) without doing that.

Exposed credentials means that somebody got sloppy the password. So yeah, “stolen creds”. Give the fact that a) NYT seems knows which credentials were exposed, and b) We haven’t seen hundreds of other high(er) profile companies have their private repos breached, it is far more likely that NYT fucked up, and not Microsoft (which is what you implied, with nothing to back it up - other than a very narrow-minded definition of the word hack).