[superbatfish]

It think the parent's point here could be rephrased like this:

Copyright law treats "involved a human" vs. "involved a machine" as fundamentally different just because humans are special-cased, not due to any deeper reason. Just by fiat.

The law gives special consideration to humans "just because". Therefore, if one situation involves a human in a particular role and another situation involves a machine, then there is no useful analogy to be drawn -- as far as the law is concerned. Even if the analogy makes perfect sense to you and me, the law treats humans and machines as fundamentally different, so all bets are off.