There is a fundamental difference between a human taking time to learn a thing and a machine that gobbles up everything it can find in order to replicate it.

Good luck getting these people to even acknowledge that, though. Even though they'll acknowledge it in literally every other circumstance of ML.

Of course there are loads of differences between how humans learn and how AI models learn, from substrate to architecture. I don't see why any of those differences should make a difference to the morality or legality of learning from copyrighted material.