I’m not pretending anything. All art does consist of ideas. Some also consists of a physical aspect and that physical aspect can be stolen. The intellectual, or idea part cannot be.

You’re the one who tried to move the goalposts to physical media with your museum analogy. So I modified that to make it as close to this situation as possible but still contain the same concepts–making a copy, and then, yes, using it however I wish after the fact. I didn’t spell that out because I thought the point was obvious but sure we can go there too.

I can take my photographs of paintings and put them into AI training data if I want to. The museum is not going to hunt me down for this because again, it obviously harms no one.

But let me make my own analogy here. If I broke into PizzaCake’s house and stole a physical print of this comic, are you asserting that’s the same as me downloading a copy of it here? Let’s say I use them the same way after the fact, for AI or whatever harmless use you find most offensive.

The entire AI industry stands on top of the IP house of cards you are defending far more fundamentally than any need to access data for free. If they were forced to follow copyright law, sure, their training data might get a bit worse, it might cost them a bit more but fundamentally they would continue to do the same things. In contrast, if they didn’t have a monopoly on the product of that training, there would be no profit model for them whatsoever. And you are defending that foundation here, no matter what you may think.