Artist Jingna Zhang built Cara, a platform explicitly intended to protect artists from having their art stolen by AI...and yet these people just won't leave them well enough alone.
Mildly hot take:
It really points to these people just having really bad moral compasses.
In other words, these people are actually just bad people, as weird as that is to realize.
Like if you don't understand that what you're doing is wrong, that does not entirely excuse you from moral judgement of the rest of society; if you fundamentally disagree with the premise of something being good or bad with another person, it does follow that they're a bad person. Which then does mean that people doing shit like this are objectively bad people, doing objectively bad things.
Which brings back to question of how bad something needs to be for it to constitute being "evil". I'm not religious, but there's a certain level of how something bad impacts others, intent, and context, that I believe most people would classify as evil. Not demons and hell and that nonsense, but effectively something worth crusading against and being extremely hostile towards. Something that threatens life and peace, and of a certain scale, I would call "evil".
So these bad people doing stuff like this, with the intent of stealing on a massive scale, directly against the autonomy and will of artists... Not exactly evil, at first.. but if it results in actual harm, and if that harm is intended... that, I would define as an act of evil.
So yeah, just a topic or perspective I think worth discussing. We all know something's really wrong right now in society, and I think there's a level of even language and ethics that hasn't caught up or isn't in full view. I also realize the dangers of proposing this and it being a slippery slope to what it may even advocate. That being said, again, I think it's a perspective worth entertaining at least from a philosophical perspective and discussion.