AI art is stealing even less than piracy is. If copying a digital movie without paying for it isn’t stealing than how is generating a digital image based on thousands of digital images?

Humans also do it all the time, going onboard with the IP mafia on AI it’s like if every even vaguely impressionist painting author needed to pay royalties to Claude Monet or if every conventional fantasy author had to do it for Tolkien, except Tolkien also got his inspirations from previous works so i guess whomever is the lawful inheritors of Snorri Sturlusson and Elias Lonnrot suddenly become very rich, except that they also compiled their works based on… and so on and on and on

Intellectual property is a bad thing.

Even if we ignore every other impact of IP, it was historically always used by publishing industry against the individual artist.