>Why is book piracy a better way of doing things?

You twist the argument. Your argument would hold if AI's only use would be to generate booksverbatim it was already trained on. Which is certaintly not the case and huge efforts were made to circumvent this kind of usage.

Because you want as many people as possible to be exposed to your ideas, to the point that Christianity used to fund armies to go to other places so they could force the teachings of Jesus Christ upon them. If your thoughts aren't at least as good as that, why are you wasting eink on them?

That is a pretty irrelevant point considering they could have just bought all the books and we would still be in the same situation.

Obviously the authors should sue them to bankruptcy though.