Not necessarily, many online assessments I've encountered had a technical discussion session where you describe your problem solving process and design decisions. The ranking is more subjective for this component. Not to mention plenty of the assessments have more and less optimal solutions, as well as edge cases in the grading inputs that aren't in the sample inputs.

For a first-round interview, it was not uncommon to have a leet-code style automated assignment as early as the mid 2010s. I recall more than a few highly regarded employers that did this in 2014.

Is an AI interview meaningfully different than one of these automated interview systems? A lot of people are assuming that there'd be a human interview absent this AI interview, but it could very easily just be another automated interview - just a less sophisticated one. A company using an AI interview where I'd normally see a Leet-code assignment (e.g a first round coding interview) would not strike me as a bad thing.

Of course if they wanted to the the entire interview loops with AI I'd stay away.

To the contrary, there have been many cases of very similar novels with largely identical plot points and settings that survive copyright allegations, even if the author was exposed to the original work.

For a rather entertaining example (though raunchy, for a heads up): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhWWcWtAUoY&themeRefresh=1

As other pointed out, the notion of "clean room" rewrites is to make a particularly strong case of non-infringement. It doesn't mean that anything other than a clean room implementation is an infringement.