The fact that this is propping up the entire AI industry adds additional weight. When legislating or deciding court cases, some won't be willing to pop the cash cow, some will be worried about falling behind countries that don't enforce copyright evenly. IP owners are trying to go after the AI industry, with only mixed to poor success.

Hard to justify that they can't afford to pay when they have multi-billion dollar valuations and are apparently paying hundreds of millions to get a single engineer.

Maybe. But we are talking about the whole of copyrighted creative works created and sold by humanity. That'll get expensive no matter who you are.