If an AI can look at a bunch of Picasso paintings and "learn" how to then replicate that same style, I don't think that's stealing. And I think the same concept applies to the written word.

However even if you were correct, would you be willing to trade copyright law for having a cure for most diseases? I would. Maybe by allowing 1000s of people to sell books, you've condemned millions of people to death by disease right? Can you not see that side of the argument? Sometimes things are nuanced with shades of gray rather than black and white.

Maybe by having copyright law we have allowed the authorship of books to flourish and critical mass to drive down the costs of books and allowed people to dedicate themselves to writing books as a profession, or made giving up weekends on a passion project worth completing. Maybe the world you want is less literate/less thought provoking because people can't feed themselves on 'your work is free' resulting in less being written because people who would have been authors are no longer rewarded.

All I know is society decided that copyright was worth the tradeoff of having people release their works and now huge corporations want to change the rules so that they can use those works to creative a derivative that the corporation can profit from.

I think both copyright law and AI consumption of copyrighted material can coexist peacefully. I can learn from what I read and then process that information to create my own novel works, and I think that's what LLMs are doing too.

If LLMs were just doing data compression and then spitting out what they memorized then that would violate copyright, but that's now how it works.