Unpopular opinion: AI Art is not the bugaboo people have made it up to be in their minds.
Both of my kids are currently at a summer college arts program, ready to pursue careers in different artistic specialties. I'm not saying any of this lightly.
How well does a blind artist sketch and color realistic images? In general, not particularly well. Because as humans we see things, and that impacts how we create things. A blind human has a brain, but they haven't had any images to train it on.
I can look through early sketchbooks of my youngest and tell when they started watching Steven Universe, because they adopted the bean mouths and the noses at the very least. Or, to use the rhetoric often repeated by those against AI Art, they scraped commercial art and used that to produce their own.
"Um, wait, it's not the same!", I hear some correct.
You are correct. How humans learn and how these models are being trained are very different approaches. Just like there are plenty of terrestrial living things that don't learn the same way we do. That the process on how to internalize what is observed can vary without invalidating it. So you are correct, but that's particular fact is irrelevant.
If you copy someone's paper, it's plagiarism. If you read a dozen books and using the gestalt of those ideas write a paper, it's research. All we do beyond the very basics as a baby is built on things we've experienced before. You haven't "scraped" or "plagiarized" your 3rd grade history book when you bring up a fact you learned from it.
Now this isn't saying all AI Art is good. I have a problem with a human artist forging a new Rubens and passing it off as an original. Same for AI Art - using it to create images that it would be wrong for a human to create is still wrong for AI Art. But the same holds true the other way. I wouldn't be mad if a post-doc wrote a paper based on reading hundred or thousands of sources over their learning period, tying things together that weren't necessarily together previously. Why should I be upset when AI does the same thing?
TL;DR: Humans experience copyrighted material all the time without permission, it can affect our output. We accept that without even considering it. Yet when AI Art does the same, we're up in arms.
Oh, and a corollary Unpopular Opinion: Once Pandora's Box has opened, it's very hard to stuff things back in and continue selling buggy whips to the owners of Mr. Ford's new automobile.
