If a company unethically steals data and publishes a book with that data, we don’t say that there are legitimate concerns using books.

Off course we say its a legitimate concern if someone unethically steals data and publishes a book with that data... The point of scraping and stealing data without respecting its license, training their software with it and using it commercially (or even non commercially) without giving even credit and not respecting its original license?

the problem that people ... have with AI isn’t with the technology itself nor its use, but the methods by which the companies “grow and harvest it”, so to speak.

No, its not just the methods. I am talking about deep problems with the technology, the methods how companies go with it, and then its usage from company and end user. Ai trained with those data and used makes it impossible to respect the original license, for the user. So in this case, the company using the Ai AND the user of the model violate licenses. Maybe. Maybe not, if the data allows it. But we don't know and CANNOT check and know for sure, that's the problem. Just because you don't understand the issue or don't care does not make it less of a problem.

As an example with software licenses like GPL requires that any derivative works using this source code (such as Linux or whatever my personal program is licensed under GPL) has to be GPL licenses (Open Source) too. That is not debatable. That is how this license work. Now the Ai can be trained on this data, using the source code, and then? See where this goes? That is only one generalized example.