>Why is book piracy a better way of doing things?
You twist the argument. Your argument would hold if AI's only use would be to generate booksverbatim it was already trained on. Which is certaintly not the case and huge efforts were made to circumvent this kind of usage.
What's twisted? They pirated books to train their models.
Clearly these books had value to AI companies but they were too weak and too dishonest to pay for that value. That's not impressive.