Allowing AI companies to get away with this because we're "better off"¹ is like eating our seeds. Sure, we built something cool with the massive corpus available, but how will it affect future decisions to develop or share creative work?

If nothing else, a sense of justice tells me that if somebody's work directly helps create a profitable tool, that person should share some of the profit. The size of the share can be negotiated, but the AI companies didn't even reach out before the law suits. And even then, only to major sources of content (some of whom don't have the copyright for their content, just a limited license for distribution on a website and all the nitty gritty involved in that).

1: In a sense, a world with these models has more capabilities and is therefore better. But this is the real world with real people, who are emotional and competitive. So let's see how it actually plays out.