That's what this boils down to: What are our rights?

Everyone has a right to scrape the Internet. That includes corporations who scrape the Internet to train AI models.

If we take away that right, how would the Internet even work? It wouldn't.

Example: I could tell curl right now to download this techcrunch article and all the comments about it on HN and I'd be violating no law. I'd be infringing on no one's rights.

If I then distributed these downloaded files without permission then I'd be violating copyright law. The thing it certainly would not be is theft!

People claim AI companies are "stealing" human labor but that's not true. They're saving (in their databases) the fruits of human labor and other bots/software. Then they're using that data to train AI models.

The only conclusion I can make whenever someone says "AI is theft!" is that they have no idea what they're talking about.

My assumption is that what they really mean is, "AI is bad for labor!" and possibly, "cheap AI is incompatible with capitalism." Which very well could be true.

But if AI really undermines the value of labor that much, the problem isn't the AI, it's capitalism.