Do you use google search for work? Then you are profiting from someone else's hard work!

The difference is that when you search on Google - at least before AI overviews - you end up at the source site.

Also Google respects robots.txt. Every site that Google surfaces chose to be in the index.

Thats not entirely true. Google might or might not hide your pages from index. They'll definitely going to scrape it anyway. They also display summarized info from your page (famous "what is scrapping" joke showing wikipedias summary). Finally, you might just get your answer without visiting - just by skimming result description.

Revenue is not profit.

I didn't say it was. I understand that profit = revenue - cost.

I said they're profiting from other people's hard work, a separate concept.

profiting != profit

'stealing is fine if you lose money when reselling'

I don't believe I wrote anything of the sort.

If you boil it down anyone on this planet can access ChatGPT (and other for profit LLMs) for free to answer any question they might have.

Knowledge is shared among humanity at a rapid speed. Everyone benefits.

It’s mind boggling how anyone could be opposed to that.