Scientific publications also share knowledge openly. Only private journals are locking up papers, but they are losing ground. At least AI papers are free to read and implement. They share even code, datasets and trained models.
I think the ethos of progress is with open culture not closed copyrights.
Put yourself in their shoes. Maybe you use some AI derivative work for your own life's work and then when you've finally accomplished what you want to do, someone else duplicates it, or uses the majority of your work?
What do you expect out of it. If you don't expect to be paid, great - I guess you'll be spending X other hours supporting yourself and possible family.
And if you do, you don't expect the hard work of others to be compensated? Rhetorical question.
You can go to Watt's steam engine or some such. I doubt he'd argue that his engine had intellectual property on the manual labour people did since time immemorial. But yet it did make their jobs obsolete.
Maybe some of them died while his patents were still in play. All the same, his invention, his idea, plays by the rules.
You shouldn't say anything to anyone who doesn't respect copyright laws - or, rather, you shouldn't have to. Your tax dollars, and the entity that you authorize to be the one to use force where you live, should be able to say whatever you, as the governed citizen, want to say to the person who doesn't respect copyright.
That just seems like a sociopathic argument to circumvent perfectly clear laws intended to protect people who expend energy into offering new ideas and also trying to diminish what is already delineated as right and wrong. In the blatant sense.
I'm not sure how your gun analogy funnels along to fair use.
As with anyone who doesn't seem to respect copyright laws, I'd say to them, give me a copy of everything useful you've ever done in your life. Going by the same rule.