So, I agree with you. THey were and are currently wrong for doing that. Would AI trained on free and available work, IF it was on par with AI now, be acceptable?

It well acceptable when they make an actual intelligence that can understand what morals are, and create art from scratch the same way human artists do, and understand what it is they've created.. rather than the current unnecessarily complex copying machine.

Yes, the problem is verifying that the data used to train it was all provided with consent. The majority of AI available to the public at the moment are trained using data sets collected by bot scrapers. As it stands the vast majority of AI produced content is theft. Additionally, I feel that [1/2]

Not made by any current company. They don't get to build their empire on the backs of free labour exploitation and then turn around and go "sorry~ We'll do it right this time." The industry needs to repair what it has damaged before trying to move on to "ethical" models.