The question to me is how you define what the AI is doing in a way that isn't hilariously overbroad to the point of saying "Disney can copyright the style of having big eyes and ears", or "computers can't analyze images".

Any law expanding copyright protections will be 90% used by large IP holders to prevent small creators from doing anything.

What exactly should be protected that isn't?

Right, because the cool part of upgrading your phone is trying to make it feel like its your phone, from scratch. Perishable software is anything but desirable, unless you enjoy having the very air you breathe sold to you.

I don't think they work the same way, but I think they work in ways that are close enough in function that they can be treated the same for the purposes of this conversation.

Pen and pencil are "the same", and either of those and printed paper are "basically the same".
The relationship between a typical modern AI system and the human mind is like that between a pencil written document and a word document: entirely dissimilar in essentially every way, except for the central issue of the discussion, namely as a means to convey the written word.

Both the human mind and a modern AI take in input data, and extract relationships and correlations from that data and store those patterns in a batched fashion with other data.
Some data is stored with a lot of weight, which is why I can quote a movie at you, and the AI can produce a watermark: they've been used as inputs a lot. Likewise, the AI can't perfectly recreate those watermarks and I can't tell you every detail from the scene: only the important bits are extracted. Less important details are too intermingled with data from other sources to be extracted with high fidelity.

That's a different goalpost. I get the difference between 8 billion brains, and 8 billion instances of the same AI. That has nothing to do with whether there is a difference in copyright infringement, though.

If you want another goalpost, that IMHO is more interesting: let's discuss the difference between 8 billion brains with up to 100 years life experience each, vs. just a million copies of an AI with the experience of all human knowledge each.

(That's still not really what's happening, which is tending more towards several billion copies of AIs with vast slices of human knowledge each).

Imagine thinking Public Education doesn't count. Or that no one without a college degree ever invented anything useful. That's before we get to your notion of "College SHOULD be expensive, for everyone, always".

The problem with education is NOT that some people pay less for theirs, or nothing at all, nor that some even have the audacity to learn quickly. AI could help everyone to have a chance to learn cheaply, even quickly.

That's wrong on so many levels:

1. Go check the Gutenberg Project and the patent registry, come back when you've learned them all, they're 100% free for everyone.
2. Fleshbags have to pay for "dumbed down" educational material just to have a chance at learning anything during their lifespan, AIs don't.
3. The lion's share of "paying for education" isn't even paid for education, but for certification. AIs would have to pay the same... if any were dumb enough to spend "several years worth of salary" on some diploma.
4. The only part worth paying for, is "hands on experience", which right now is far more expensive for AIs (need simulations and robots built).
5. Training AIs already isn't free, they need thousands to millions of repetitions to learn the stuff, which means quite a buck in server costs.

So just because fleshbags are really bad at learning, does not mean Google's AI has to pay for the same shortcomings, they already pay for their own.