The judge/law will say it comes down to intent.

Here's my take from an audio DSP viewpoint.

A composer listens to 10,000 hours of music. One day she writes an original piece based on the annealed parameters (temporal, spectral, intensity, pitch, sequence...) of a million artists. However it sounds like another specific artist who sues.

It is not a cover, a remix, homage, or even forged in the genre... it's just accidentally a bit too like it. (compare: Banana Splits vs. Bob Marley - and - Huey Lewis vs. Ray Parker Jr. - which completely misses the real impact of "Pop Muzik" by M)

The question is, was she exposed to influencing materials incorporated without intent or was it plagiarism (intent to reproduce a derivative etc) ?

By contrast I can take a piece of music, break it down by analysis into melodies, chords, timings, and use FFT to extract the precise spectrums of instruments, feed those to a resynthesis engine that finds new synthesiser parameters to create an exact sound-alike and then deliberately recreate a piece "In the near style of artist X". With a little musical processing I can change the key, inversions, re-template the rhythm to a new swing... always pushing the derived piece into new territory until eventually it's barely recognisable.

Nonetheless, in the second case I have clearly intended to steal someone's idea and "make it my own" by automatable transformation.

In the former case it seems to be a "genuine labour". (whatever that means in 2023)

The genuine artist intends to make something through intellectual labour.

Maybe that's the real question. I mean, about "labour". If the cost of the labour tends to zero, does it really matter?