Now I sail the high seas myself, but I don't think Paramount Studios would buy anyone's defence they were only pirating their movies so they can learn the general content so they can produce their own knockoff.
However, Paramount, itself, does pirate content specifically to learn its content so it can produce its own knockoff. As do all the other major studios.
No one engages in IP enforcement in good faith, or respects the IP of others if they can find benefit in circumventing it.
That's part of the problem. None of the key stakeholders (other than the biggest stakeholder, the public) are interested in preserving the interests of the creators, artists and developers, rather are interested in their own profit gains.
Which makes this not about big companies stealing from human art.
Yes, Generative AI very much does borrow liberally from human art, yet the artists mostly signed away their rights log ago, just to get published in the first place, and artists routinely their art stolen by their own publishing houses at length, and notoriously cheated out of residuals. They are screwed before AI ever came around. (With a small but growing number of — usually pirate-friendly — exceptions.)
Instead it's about IP-holding companies slugging it out with big computing companies, a kaiju match that is likely to leave Tokyo (that is, the rest of us, creators and consumers alike) in ruin.