Because of the context. At no point were AI labs mentioned in the story, it is all about these assholes from "pro-ai" spaces who scrape the platform and then brag about it and publicly taunt the Cara admin. You can go see them in their stupid little subreddits and such, they are not shy about it.

Now for the other side of the question : why on earth would an AI company, who is already getting sued left and right for infringement, get into a public spat with the admin of a marginal community ? And for a dozen million images of mixed styles and media, that would barely move the needle of an image gen model. It doesn't add up.

Well, the ones advertising it are not AI companies.

And I think they're more interested in bulk data than spending their expensive manpower on cracking some niche site. But I suppose we dont know for sure; they could have been partially scraped, silently.