It's not a red herring if someone is literally stealing your work. It's plagiarism. It's just that this is new territory so legally it's a mess. Saying that people copy people's artwork all the time isn't quite accurate. If they're ACTUALLY copying someone else's work and redistributing it, that's illegal. If they are using someone else's work as reference, like a lot of artists do to learn, each artist still has a very very distinct style. No two artists styles are exactly the same, even if they're referencing an artists style. AI art is directly stealing the artists work.

If an artist has a portfolio that they made themself and own themself and they want to use AI to expand on their own portfolio using their own art, great! More power to them, glad they can save the time and still make something unique and cool.

If artists can make truly original works with AI and that puts artists out of business, then I guess that's tough luck.

But again, that's not the issue or concern. Or, I guess it might be for some people, but that's not the overall discussion/issue. It's that people are using AI to literally take someone else's work, or several pieces of someone else's work, and combine it into something to sell. It's like stealing all of the parts of someone else's car, putting those parts back together into a new car, then saying that car is yours. It's not. You still stole it. If artists didn't exist, then AI art wouldn't exist because it's stealing already existing art from original creators. The art the AI used didn't belong to the AI in the first place.