It’s also important to remember these models are trained by sampling (imitating aspects of) images they don’t have the rights to use directly.

So is basically every human artist. Basically any artist out there has seen tons of other art prior and draws on that observed corpus to influence their own output. If I commissioned you to draw something you didn't know what was, you'd go look up other depictions of that thing to get a basis for what you should be aiming at.

The way AI does it is similar, except that it's looked at way more examples than you but also doesn't have an understanding of what those things actually are beyond the examples themselves. That last bit is why it used to have so many problems with hands, and still often has problems with writing in the background or desk/table legs.

Not all them. Some are trained on pure public domain data (though admittedly most folks running locally are probably using Flux or Stable Diffusion out of convenience).

And IMO that’s less of an issue if money isn’t changing hands. If the model is free, and the “art” is free, that’s a transformative work and fair use.

It’s like publishing a fanfic based on a copyrighted body. But try to sell the fic (or sell a service to facilitate such a thing), and that’s a whole different duck.

It’s also important to remember these models are trained by sampling

IMO, training software on the corpus of human art without payment or attribution is not good for society and art in general, but, humans who create non-abstract are trained and honestly create in a strikingly similar way. The person hired to make an art piece of Catherine the Great doesn't disclose that he looked at Alexander Roslin's painting of her and is greatly copying the look and feel for the face or the Google search they used to find options for 1700's royal clothing. The big difference in process between AI and an artist with reference art is the removal of the human element, and that's super important.

But instead, we focus on how it was trained, when we train much the same way, or we call it all slop regardless of the actual quality, instead of calling out the real problem, the one problem that we can do something about, it's taking a living away from humans.