You're making a classical error programmers make when encountering legal systems: Treating law with the same rules of logic as code.
I can cite case law carving out lines around things like copy in RAM/SDD/etc. accessing a web site (very clearly legal) or internal copies for search engines (very close to the border, but still legal), but courts -- at least in systems based on common law -- don't work like a computer program or a mathematical argument.
So the general argument "X is like Y" doesn't work if you're looking purely at the technical action. The exact same action at the level of bits and bytes can be legal in one context and illegal in another.
What matters to courts are things which are less easy to formalize: intent, impact, etc.
Just as with computer science, there is a rigorous and formal analysis, but very different from the one you're making, and operating under very different rules.
For one thing, I was replying to your own attempt to do a programmer style legalism, of "welp, you instantiated a copy, therefore it must be copyright infringement, case closed". I was already basing that on the principle you're now appealing to, to say that that isolated fact alone doesn't settle the matter (which is a much lower bar than the broader point that, all things considered, generative AI isn't infringement).
It's great that you recognize that programmer-style legalisms don't work in the law! It just wish you'd had that insight in mind when making your original comment.
Second, to the extent that I endorsed the general argument (generative AI not infringing), I wasn't claiming that the point worked because of some mechanistic technicality, but because of the very broad trend of accepting internal copies for a wide range of saleable data products. That is, in fact, how analogical reasoning works in law: courts compare the case at hand to similar ones.
Is any one point definitive? Of course not. But brushing off all analogies is unjustified deflection. If you think there are more pressing considerations that override the pattern I've pointed to -- like why the "intent, impact, etc" matter here -- great! I'm happy to have that conversation. But you can't just gesture at "legal rigor is hard" as if that's some kind of counterargument.
I can cite case law carving out lines around things like copy in RAM/SDD/etc. accessing a web site (very clearly legal) or internal copies for search engines (very close to the border, but still legal), but courts -- at least in systems based on common law -- don't work like a computer program or a mathematical argument.
So the general argument "X is like Y" doesn't work if you're looking purely at the technical action. The exact same action at the level of bits and bytes can be legal in one context and illegal in another.
What matters to courts are things which are less easy to formalize: intent, impact, etc.
Just as with computer science, there is a rigorous and formal analysis, but very different from the one you're making, and operating under very different rules.