The copyright infringement comes about later, when that mass of numbers is used to produce a topically related work. The same rules apply for humans -- see the concept of "clean room implementation".
My limited understanding of case law is that transformative use is still judged very human-centricly.
E.g. the courts take a dim view of any attempt to create a machine (in the abstract sense) that takes in copywritten works and churns out similar-but-uncopywritten works
