What is stolen?

Pictures, images, fanfic. All pirated copies.

But the original owners of those pictures, images, fanfic, all still have them, so stolen seems like the wrong use of word.

give the semantics a rest, I would love to hear a more cogent argument for why microsoft and its shareholders should get to profit from unlicensed data just because they found a way to repackage it into a helpful harmless assistant

So you're saying that any data, regardless of origin should be licensed. So should we paying dividend to einstien for e=mc2? Or should he have paid dividends to any of the math or physics before him that he used to further humanity? I mean since it's just semantics since he clearly "stole" the e, the =, the m, the c, and the 2.

math isn't covered by copyright law

really my opinion is copyright should be 7 years from publication date, but whatever it is, i would like for it to be applied equally

Still... I don't think it's bad as such. We all benefit from it. I view it in a similar way to Google indexing. Or human learning. We all benefit from society's knowledge as a whole. Especially for models that are open source (well, public weights) I think it's a good thing.

Of course not everyone agrees but only in the rarest of instances will it return source data verbatim.

Even if that's true we don't all benefit from it equally, or in the same ways. An artist whose work was used without compensation for training data and who now can't find paid work benefits how? Just in the same vague general sense that we all do? That hardly seems honest.

But hey if it is true then we can nationalize it. If it's built on our collective labor and applied to our collective benefit then there is no justification for letting the profits accumulate to a few companies and their investors.