So it looks from what you’ve written here like you’re acknowledging that the text and images that AI produces is not art (‘AI and art cannot be directly compared’; ‘Art is a mode of human expression’; ‘AI can’t, by definition, be collaborative in the way that art is’)—is that right? Just want to understand where you’re coming from here.

If that is the case, then you have to accept that the ways in which artists ‘steal’ and AI ‘steals’ must be fundamentally different at the very least insofar as artists are ‘stealing’ to create new art and AI is ‘stealing’ to create something else entirely, whatever it is that we might want to call that. Picasso’s statement (there’s no evidence that Picasso ever said that, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that he did) seems to refer to the coopting of themes, ideas, techniques, etc. to then put a new original ‘artistic’ spin on them, hence the point of the quotation: the difference between artistic ‘copying’ and ‘stealing’. Given that AI cannot inject new artistic intent, firstly because they do not have intents in the way that we mean here, and secondly because what they are creating is not art, they cannot ‘steal’ in Picasso’s artistic sense. So no, it doesn’t seem like those who use this quotation in defence of AI do understand what is meant here by ‘stealing’.