No, that's not actually how it works in the real world. You're equating the human process of learning and practicing art to scraping and feeding a bunch of stuff into a machine learning algorithm, but they couldn't be more different.

Of course a human artist learns from studying the works of other artists, but not at all in the same way that AI does. A human artist has a lifetime of lived experiences which contain a perspective that is unique to their place and time, as well as direct sensory observations and a worldview than informs how they learn and create. Human artists also have individual tastes and personal agency that inform the kinds of work that they like and want to study from.

In other words, when a person draws a cat, for example, they aren't just recycling images of cats that they've seen in other people's artwork, they are also imbuing their artwork with their own understanding of what a cat is, how it looks and acts, etc.

People don't function like statistical models. They don't experience the universe in the same way, they don't learn in the same way, and they certainly don't create or interact with artistic media in the same way. Even a digital painting made by a human is not analogous to generative AI output despite the fact that they are both pixels in the end. It's an entirely different process from start to finish. Would anyone seriously try to argue that what Suno is doing with music in any way equivalent to a person learning how to play the piano or the guitar?

On top of that, a human is obviously not going to have the same potential impact on the market that generative AI would have. Even the most experienced writer can only thoughtfully write a book so quickly, while an LLM can be used to generate countless books in a single day. The market impact of a use is one of the key pillars to making a determination of "fairness" in a legal/copyright sense, and it's abundantly clear that human learning and "machine learning" are not comparable in terms of their market impact.

In other words, when people equate AI to human learning, it is nothing more than anthropomorphization and personification. What is fair for a human to do one way is not necessarily fair for a corporate computer system to do in an entirely different way. It's comparing apples to oranges.

If we're going to talk about the fairness of using copyrighted works for AI training, we have to talk about that specific process, as it really is, and how it affects society. People who equate a person trying to learn how to manga with a corporate image generation machine strip mining every image on the internet are doing nothing but providing cover for some of the biggest, richest corporations on Earth while they exploit the work of unpaid creative labor.