I understand their argument, but I'm arguing that their argument must fundamentally imply some form of underlying consciousness, or at least some before-now-nonexistent property that elevates it above an ordinary computer program and makes it compatible with a reading/interpretation of the law independent of the material differences between the AI program and a human.

Setting aside the bandwidth and compute issues for a moment, if Stable Diffusion was a tool that when prompted, downloaded and ingested 2.4 billion images (regardless of license), ran some really complex algorithms on them, and then spit out a derivative result - in other words, take out the AI - I think people would view the tool very differently.

At some point along the way, it seems people jump to a belief that because of <some component / step in the process>, this is no longer just a computer program that scraped the entire Internet without asking.