I know you're joking, but what the AI training lawsuits have said so far is that training and digitizing used books that you bought is fair use, but piracy isn't.

For "you" as a natural person. Companies are legally free to download books for free to train AI.

honestly, the world is becoming such a joke as a whole, that "joke" may well become the new norm.

That would be a valid argument if they weren’t redistributing the data verbatim.

"Valid"? In a legal sense? Moral?

Drawing the analogy would be valid.