Learning and then reproducing parts of a work already is illegal, depending on context. Also, “learning” here isn’t the same thing as what college students do.

Learning and then reproducing parts of a work already is illegal, depending on context. Also, “learning” here isn’t the same thing as what college students do. For one thing, you can’t copy-paste a college student’s whole brain. You can’t own and sell their brains (well, ah, you know what I mean—not the organ trade). For another… it’s simply not the same thing. It might be, we suppose, similar to some parts of how human learning work, but it’s plainly not identical and may not be especially close. We use the same word for what LLMs do because it’s a convenient and useful-enough analogy, but that doesn’t mean we can prove anything else simply based on our having re-used the word “learn” here. “That’s learning, this is learning, so all things that apply to one apply to the other”—no, that doesn’t follow, it takes more than that.