Not to come at you from another side, but if you really mean the above, then I think you’ve already
Anyway. We agree that current law deals poorly with AI’s implications for creative works, and the tech companies wouldn’t have rolled out these products if they didn’t think they had a case to make. I don’t think the status of AI under copyright infringement law is as settled as you’ve been implying, though.
The picture these lawyers paint seems more ambiguous and accurate:
"Defendants also assert that after the models are trained, they do not contain any copies of the “scraped” content, or any copy of the material that was used to train the model. However, the defendants have generally not yet provided a theory as to why copies made in the process of training the AI models or creating the training databases are not infringement…
“With at least a dozen copyright cases pending, we are witnessing a period of litigation that will likely determine the legal relationship between content creators and AI platforms. Until the legal dust settles, however, there will be uncertainty and risk of copyright liability that anyone contracting with respect to the use of AI platforms should be aware of.”
The dust is far from settled on this one, and it wouldn’t surprise me if multiple jurisdictions come down with different regulatory regimes that affect companies that sell work in e.g. the US, UK, and EU. Harmonization of copyright law is hard work, and I’m guessing that the AI question is going to toss up a lot more of it.
Meanwhile, while “theft” is primarily a legal category, it’s also a moral one. I think you’re mistaken that
It would be more than fair to push people to clarify whether they’re making a legal or moral claim, and even to encourage them to use words other than “theft” for clarity’s sake. But the category of legal wrongdoing is extensive and widely recognized; if you can understand someone saying that an entity is “getting away with [literal] murder” you can understand the claim that they’re getting away with theft.