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.
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.