Would you permit human students of art to view and learn from copyrighted images under these hypothetical laws?
It's like saying that the CNC machine should also be given mandatory time off each year just as all the other factory workers.
One is a machine, the other a human, what rights and laws apply to one don't mean they make sense and should be applied to the other.
The better framing is, should art students also be allowed to make derived work from copyrighted images without permission?
The output image from a model is basically a derivation from it's entire dataset, I mean this is mathematically demonstrable. If it wasn't for a few stochastic parts of the model and explicitly added randomization, it be deterministic even.
It takes copyrighted work + prompt and outputs derived image.
I don't think the question of derivation is being debated that much though, the question is if it's fair use. As in, deriving from copyrighted work a ML model, maybe that's fair use. And that's what has to be figured out.
They should be, and are allowed to do this.
The problem is in most of these cases is that a powerful entity is profiting off of other people's work without their consent and gives nothing to the exploited members in return. Sure, an individual human learns from copyrighted works and reincorporates to make something slightly new all the time. And then they may also profit from it and not give anything in return to those that came before.
The problem here is the scale and the power that enables that scale. This is industrial level mining of non-consenting humans, exploiting their life's work in many cases.