Yes. Theft explicitly requires "Intent permanently to deprive". Copying things is not theft because the supposed "victim" was never in fact deprived of their thing, not even temporarily.
England has a whole bunch of legislation to prohibit activities that are not theft because it turns out that sometimes we care about other things. TWOC is an example, "Taking Without Owners Consent", because it turns out that it's also very annoying to have people take your car and then drive it somewhere and abandon it for a laugh ("Joy riding"), compared to them say, stealing it to ship abroad, break into parts or just to set it on fire.
Insisting that it's all theft gets us in the same muddle as when we decide that holding up a protest sign is terrorism, or that a billion dollar bribe is speech.
Theft of IP permanently deprives the author of ownership claim. It’s quite a problem if you want people to innovate or create new stuff, because they usually do this with an expectation to be able to claim ownership and have a healthy degree of control over how the work is used and/or monetized.
Actually, IP theft is more of a problem than theft of physical property. The latter you can just buy again while the former robs you of intangible values that among other things may grant you the ability to just buy physical property. The latter doesn’t scale and is generally more difficult because it’s more visible, while the former can be (and is being, in fact) done at population scale without people realizing it until it’s too late.
The pretence that three almost entirely unrelated "intellectual property rights" somehow make ideas property, at least akin to personal property and sometimes even akin to real property (aka land to lay people) is very silly. Each is silly in its own distinct way, with the most defensible probably being Trademark, an extension of the rather older legal concept of "Passing off". But really abolishing all three of them might be a reasonable step, up there with getting rid of smoking.
Do you remember when there was smoking on aeroplanes? The little glowing sigil telling you not to smoke would go out at cruise altitude and then you could fill the already inadequate and stale air with smoke. Who thought that was a good idea? Well, a lot of the same people who thought Copyright was great. Maybe all the lead damaged their brains?
Does any of this somehow mean what the LLM companies are doing is good? No. But we can't understand what's happening if we insist on giving it the wrong name. Russia is not in Ukraine to undo nazification, the babies Israel is starving aren't terrorists. "But I want to use this word" doesn't make it the correct word.
Again, I agree it is not the same as theft of physical property. In fact, I point out that it is worse. Yes, unfortunately English language lacks a better word.
England has a whole bunch of legislation to prohibit activities that are not theft because it turns out that sometimes we care about other things. TWOC is an example, "Taking Without Owners Consent", because it turns out that it's also very annoying to have people take your car and then drive it somewhere and abandon it for a laugh ("Joy riding"), compared to them say, stealing it to ship abroad, break into parts or just to set it on fire.
Insisting that it's all theft gets us in the same muddle as when we decide that holding up a protest sign is terrorism, or that a billion dollar bribe is speech.