All these AI companies MASSIVELY pirated the internet for training data

I think it's worth being a little more careful with our phrasing here. AI companies definitely did illegal piracy to train their models, but that is a separate and distinct process from them trawling the web en mass. Anthropic, for example, recently settled a case with book publishers because it had pirated their books illegally. (Frustratingly, the second article that popped up when I searched to verify this was one that highlighted the fact that the TERF-in-chief is among the beneficiaries of that settlement.) But there is no clear legal answer to the question of whether crawling websites and training from their data constitutes even a civil tort, let alone illegal behaviour.

Other than that detail though, I think we're in furious agreement. You're simply restating my point, Cory's point, and the subject of this article's point, while doing so in a tone that implies disagreement. The problem isn't the tech, it's the humans using and creating the tech and the sociopolitical environment in which it happened.

If they do go the route you describe, it seems like that would make operating an AI for an employer adjacent to a criminal enterprise, as your unspoken job title is "company scapegoat". I imagine we'd begin to see refusal to perform those jobs if that becomes widespread enough to become publicly known, as people risk incarceration for essentially performing their assigned jobs.