I agree with what @barsoap@lemm.ee said here. My argument is the same than what you’ve already heard: since it doesn’t take the original images, but rather learn from them, it acts as a human who also learns from many different images and it would make no sense to copyright all artists that a human is trained on. Also it’s true that a human artist also has his own experience that also influence the art while the neural network only has the art, however, the ai artist will provide this personal experience. So imo you shouldn’t consider image generations as plagiarism.

Though, I do agree that having people scraping your art to train a model on it is frustrating, even though it was already the case with people training on your art for their personal experience. In the case of a model it’s way more similar to the original art pieces. I haven’t made my mind on the ehtics of model training, but generating is not plagiarism in my opinion.

Anyway, my original stance was on generative ai to be used as art and not on it being plagiarism or not. Generative ai brings a say to make full pictures with minimal effort and some people generate hundreds of unoriginal similar images. Imo, since it is easy to have a final image, the artistic effort is elsewhere: the composition, originality of the subjects, mixing of new techniques: regional prompt, lora, controlnet, etc., mixing with other tools : photoshop, blender, animation, etc. You definitely can make art with generative ai, and it takes more time that it looks like. (Look up a video on comfyui, sdnext or invokeai to see example of workflows)