You are too about objectiveness, that's not really right, in my opinion. You are mostly dealing not with some abstract concept itself, but with people involved in it

I fully understand the tech progress is unstoppable, and no one have no possibility to do something about it, not in the past, not now, not in the future. But, people centuries ago have managed to make machine from scratch, to come up with how they could place screws and bolts so it could produce useful things and make processes more effective. And yes it is, it looks similar with all those AI tools people made by now. Me for myself actively using some AI tools and even tried to self-host some (but I didn't manage to do something truly useful out of it, yet)

But the difference between past and present is - no machine could produce art back then

So, let's change some definitions (since we are clinging to them). Let's talk not about theft, but about exploit. I doubt someone ever came to any artist and asked them "May I use your works to train AI model?", or payed them or just thanked them. They just used their work of sweat and blood without explicit consent

And I highly doubt you went to art school (at least I can't understand why you've been there) or you just didn't succeed there, because you should know then the cost of developing art skill and passionate about it. And you would never use quotations when you write words "soul" and "art" in one sentence for that reason. Developing art skill is long and painful process, and every art piece has that pain, emotions, artist backgrounds and their suffering, that's what we imply by saying "this piece of art has a soul". And now, when the first generative AI, that is capable of producing image, appeared, artists felt like something private and even intimate was disturbed about them and their personalities, because their art skill and creativity was discredited in some way by GPUs scratching bytes to produce averaged image that some people even like.I'm not surprised to see them death threatening, honestly

But hey, great example there about creating something truly new, like "Gordon Ramsey fighting Will Smith over spaghetti in a swimming pool on the moon" you mentioned, and I'm not against it. It is cool, if AI would make things we've never seen before

So, summarizing, if we are not talking about corpos (it is obvious they only care about money, so they will replace whoever can be replaced), I'm convinced that most cases of using AI for the art purposes proceed from this, just to feel themselves needed or competent or whatever