Our privacy was long gone well before AI companies were even founded, if people cared about their privacy then none of the largest tech companies would exist because they all spy on you wholesale.

In the US. The EU has proven that you can have perfectly functional privacy laws.

If your reasoning is based o the US not regulating their companies and so that makes it impossible to regulate them, then your reasoning is bad.

That information is published freely online.

Do companies have to avoid hiring people who read and were influenced by copyrighted material?

I can regurgitate copyrighted works as well, and when someone hires me, places like Stackoverflow get fewer views to the pages that I’ve already read and trained on.

Are companies committing theft by letting me read the internet to develop my intelligence? Are they committing theft when they hire me so they don’t have to do as much research themselves? Are they committing theft when they hire thousands of engineers who have read and trained on copyrighted material to build up internal knowledge bases?

What’s actually happening, is that the debates around AI are exposing a deeply and fundamentally flawed copyright system. It should not be based on scarcity and restriction but rewarding use. Information has always been able to flow freely, the mistake was linking payment to restricting it’s movement.

No it’s not.

It can be problematic behaviour, you can make it illegal if you want, but at a fundamental level, making a copy of something is not the same thing as stealing something.

Piracy is not theft.

No actually, in this case Meta just built a phone into a glasses form factor. The entire problem lies with that much data about individuals being allowed to be amassed (apparently even in publicly accessible databases).

You can literally do exactly this with your iPhone and a lanyard right now.