[leereeves]

Most people could memorize enough to count as a copyright violation if they did reproduce it; as you said, actors preparing for a role certainly do so. And people with excellent memories could remember much more.

And yes, there would be a violation if someone then made another copy by reproducing it from memory. But the copy in the mind is overlooked, or forgiven. That's a copy too, just as the copy stored somewhere in the weights of an LLM is a copy.

We may not understand exactly how it's stored in either case, but it's in there somewhere. And it's worth saying again: the copy in an LLM may not be overlooked by the law.