That's part of what made the Google Books ruling so shocking; it considered Google's transformation of "we digitized and indexed these books" to be transformative. If you punch the ASOIAF quote into it, Books will reproduce the text of Game of Thrones that had your query: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22We+should+start+b...
It's still surreal that this is considered Fair Use, and even defended relatively recently (2013). It's hard to say where the ruling will land ultimately, but there seems to be an argument that verbatim reproduction doesn't matter.
It's likely defended due to being non-commericial and for the public good, as I posted with my link to the Harvard page above. That was for literal copying and pasting so the bar for transformativeness is higher, but with generative AI where it can produce wholly new code/images, I think it will also be deemed fair use.
Google Books itself being some kind of fair use transformative work is unrelated to whether you could use the output of a Google Books query as part of a book you yourself have written (and like, clearly you can't).
Yeah. I wasn't so much trying to put weight on that you can get a fragment of copyrighted text, like Google Books also provides, but using the Bible as an example my point is you could technically get the whole thing bit by bit. You can't do that with Game of Thrones likely not because of capability but because of guardrails, because for a machine what's the difference if it's fed a copyrighted text or not.
It's still surreal that this is considered Fair Use, and even defended relatively recently (2013). It's hard to say where the ruling will land ultimately, but there seems to be an argument that verbatim reproduction doesn't matter.