But humans like LLMs do have copyrighted content. That means humans are breaking the law that LLMs are also breaking.
Here's a common experience most people will have had: Think about what it feels like to slip and fall on a wet road and skin your palms on some gritty tarmac. Think about how many senses that involves, and how it's a basic experience most people have had. And now consider how we aren't even remotely close to the process of beginning to digitise such a basic experience.
'Real physical objects' don't have 'colour properties', as grouping together certain wavelength ranges of EM radiation and then assigning them a 'colour' label is a human invention.
For example, even if every human disappeared from Earth tomorrow, objects will still emit EM radiation, but won't emit human invented labels.
We see things, we recognize patterns, and we reproduce those patterns to the best of our abilities - that is the human creative process in a nutshell. It’s the process that lead to the creation of LLMs in the first place - why should our creation not follow the same methodology in order to create the same way we do? Why should a computer looking at a hundred pieces of art and producing something objectively similar to what it’s seen be any different than a human being doing the same thing?