I would argue that permanently storing mathematical representations of an artist's entire body of work to create new images in their style is completely different from "taking inspiration" from other artists. It might also be illegal, but we'll see what comes of the class action lawsuits.

The problem is that them market for the former is the large majority of what pays money.

What's really sad is that the AIs were trained by stealing work from artists. Millions of images from living artists were fed into the algorithm to train it without any of their consent.

And the AI art isn't particularly better than the living artists. It's just really good at replicating what top level artists can do, since their work was used to train it. You can enter their name and a prompt into the AI, similar to what artist's clients do when they commission them, and get pretty solid new variations of work in their style, all because their images and names were stolen against their will and are now freely available for the general public to use.

The AI would never exist or be able to produce work of that caliber without those artists, and it's now ready to destroy their careers and make it much harder for them to live off their skill.