Unless you’re generating actual random noise with an AI image generator, it’s almost like buying a fence’s stolen goods, since it is mainly just copying and merging rather than creating. It’s the same thing as piracy, if you do it and then support the crestor no one should mind, but the creator for AI art is everyone it stole from. If I pay for the generation it’s also saying to them “please steal more artwork, it is profitable.”

The bigger issue is someone who might have commissioned an artist instead uses an AI version of their art because it’s close enough to the exact style they wanted, so now their artwork was stolen, and the AIs only source for actual good art is less likely to be in the art business. The photographer or artist whose art they would’ve used or gotten flak for not sourcing is still stolen in the case of AI generation, but now it’s stolen from 200 people so there’s no obvious thing to point to besides maybe a style or a palette. If you tell it to replicate an artist’s style, it’s very obvious that it is recreating parte of images it stole, it just becomes less obvious which parts are stolen as you change the prompt.