Yet, for some reason, people still get bent out of shape when I point out that I was the first person to implement a hashtable, host a web page, run an experiment to measure the force of gravity, stare out a telescope at the moon, post a comment on Hacker News, etc, etc...
If you really think these are semantically comparable^[1] to the statement under examination then we are not speaking the same language, despite appearances to the contrary, and therefore have nothing to discuss.
I get it: hating on AI is very trendy today and it feels good to publicly agree with a righteous cause. I'm generally not a fan of this technology myself---most of these models incorporate stolen work of mine in their training sets, unattributed and uncompensated, and I think they are likely to be a disaster for the human species. I have not implemented any of them in my creative workflows or other aspects of my life, and I don't plan to.
However, I think it is important to see one's enemy clearly, and the vast majority of people participating in the anti-AI discourse are abjectly failing to do so as in this case. This can only hurt their cause, and by extension mine.
^[1] Exoplanets is a category of unique non-fungible objects which can be meaningfully discovered and measured on an individual basis. Hash tables are an abstract concept, as is hosting a web page (and creating a web page to host it fundamentally precludes discovering it, except in the sense of discovery within the creative process). Gravity, similarly, is a single 'thing' that, once discovered, cannot be discovered again.
One might easily and correctly say, however, that X person was the first to measure the force of gravity to a certain precision, or that Y person was the first to develop a particular implementation of the hash table concept, e.g. cuckoo hashing. These achievements are meaningfully distinct from the discovery of the broader concepts they extend. Discovery of a particular exoplanet is similar; however, it may surprise you to learn that the English language treats different kinds of 'things' differently, and in this case those varied, underspecified conventions of language have produced an ambiguity.