I don’t have much if an opinion on the rest of your argument but:

probably before most people started realizing it was being trained off stolen artwork as well as a lot of the other problems with AI.

This is the equivalent to those Tesla owners pasting “I bought this before Elon went crazy” stickers. Especially the creative industries were very quick to point out the problematic part of stuff like Dall-E and stable diffusion. Generative Graphical AI has never been approved of by the gamedevs I know.