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