The LLMs for text are also based on "theft". They're just much better at hiding it because they have a multitude more source material. Still, it does sometimes happen that they quote a source article verbatim.

But yeah basically they're just really good copy/paste engines that work with statistical analysis to determine the most likely answer based on what's written in basically the whole internet :P It's a bit hard to explain sometimes to people who think that the AI really "thinks". I always say: If that were the case, why is the response to a really complicated question just as fast as a simple one? The wait is just based on the length of the output.

In terms of the "theft" I think it's similar ethically to google cache though.

I despise that the artwork generators are all based on theft.

Ownership of anything is difficult to define. The internet has accelerated this loosening of definition. If I pay a subscription to use my coffee pot, do I really own it? If I take a picture of the coffee pot, do I own the picture? If I pay a photographer to take a picture of the pot do I own the picture, do I own their time?

I don't intend on trying changing your opinion on theft, but its interesting to think about how ownership feels very different as time goes by.

I totally agree with Linus Torvalds in that AIs are just overhyped autocorrects on steroids

Did he say that? I hope he didn't mean all kinds of AI. While "overhyped autocorrect on steroids" might be a funny way to describe sequence predictors / generators like transformer models, recurrent neural networks or some reinforcement learning type AIs, it's not so true for classificators, like the classic feed-forward network (which are part of the building blocks of transformers, btw), or convolutional neural networks, or unsupervised learning methods like clustering algorithms or principal component analysis. Then there are evolutionary algorithms and there are reasoning AIs like bayesan nets and so much much much more different kinds of ML/AI models and algorithms.

It would just show a vast lack of understanding if someone would judge an entire discipline that simply.