How is it different this time?

Mechanical inventions of the past were invented, designed and implemented by people who had a unique idea for how to better accomplish some task. If part(s) of their invention was already patented by someone else, then they would be required to either license that patent or find another novel approach.

Machine learning AI doesn’t work that way. In order to produce any result (let alone a good one) it must be “trained” on a dataset of other people’s works, or peoples faces, or whatever (depending on the desired result). All i ask is that people (artists, writers, musicians, etc) are fairly and regularly compensated when their copyrighted work is used to train AI.

Anything else is exploitation on an industrial scale.