Since humans are allowed to learn from and mimic intellectual property and make money from it, how smart does the AI have to be for us to give it the same rights?
This is where I land too. I do recognize the economic impact will take my livelihood too eventually.
ML algorithms are transforming the input to a latent space & learning the parameters that minimize the loss with in that space. Copyright prevents copying from the source material. But the act of mimicking style or repeating a concept mentioned elsewhere isn't protected. Sure, we'd like references in academia, but as long as the material doesn't significantly resemble the source material it has been allowed.
We are able to do it artificially now and that allows it to be done at unprecedented scale.
Society grants ownership to incentives creation. Not out of respect for Justice or fairness as your argument implies. AI doesn’t need an incentive to create and the marginal cost to create goes down almost infinitely once the AI training cost has been recouped.