I get your point that it is trained on the images and styles of artists without their will and although that may be difficult to stomach it is what all artists are trained to do until they can find their own true voice. Once you put your work out there it becomes part of the collective unconscious and there is no getting away from that.

So here's the thing. We're all humans and without even thinking about it we anthropomorphize things, especially AI partially because of the marketing and the name, but contrary to the name, it's not an intelligence. It's not referencing and it's not being inspired. These are all human things that humans do. It's just a piece of software. It is closer to an insanely sophisticated Photoshop filter than it is to any actual intelligence that exists.

Machine learning might be better called machine processing, or machine neural analysis or something like that because it's nothing like what a human is doing when they learn something. Even when a human can't draw well and has no training, they can still draw and communicate ideas with symbols. This software literally can't do anything without first processing artists artwork or photos or whatever. It has exactly zero value without the artists work adding all the value. The data is everything.

The worst skilled artist, while their work might not be aesthetically pleasing, it's still an expression of that person. These diffusion models are just a laundering system for IP infringement.