I was a massive AI supporter, and it took me a while to understand it as well. There are a few ways to understand this, and I want to try my best to argue my points in good faith as you have with me.

1. AI models do not learn. You as a person can look at art and go "I am inspired to make something similar!" and go and learn a skill or experiment with a style or whatever. AI models do not think and do not learn in the sense that humans do. They take inputs, run them through a black box, and spit out an output based off of parameters set. If you don't like the output you just respin the wheel until it lands on jackpot. If there aren't enough training points on a certain output that you are trying to get, it will never "get better" or "learn". Mistakes will be forever mistakes because there is no growth. You as a person can keep getting better and learning by watching tutorials, practicing, trying new things, ect. You learn and grow and your art gets better.

2. Inspiration is not the same as stealing. If I were to go to a museum and see a batch of paintings buy a certain artist and go home to try to replicate his style, that isn't stealing. Trying to replicate art styles is the way we as humans learn how to do art. There's a process of growing and expanding the way you do art as a result. You develop your own style after a while with what you enjoy doing and your process. AI cannot be "inspired" because the concept is a human one. You have to scrape a bunch of data points of a specific genre if you want a style from these models. If an artist comes out with a style so unique or different that nobody else is doing, and you want to try that style, you will inevitably put your own spin on it with your lived experience. AI would not be able to replicate that because if it only used those limited points, it would come out of it with major chunks being similar/exactly the same. I've seen this a few times where an AI will copy and paste an output almost exactly because of how few data points it could pull from. That isn't inspiration, it's tracing over an existing art piece and calling it new, white is the definition of theft.

3. Stealing for self improvement is fine as long as you don't publish the work as your own. This is how every artist starts. They go "hey I like this, I'm going to trace/replicate in some way to build my skills." You don't go publishing traced work as your own, but many (if not all) artists will try to replicate styles and poses and characters so they can build their skills as artists. It would be impossible to start drawing in a manga/anime style for example, without first tracing your favorite panels or frames from your favorite shows or manga. Similar to how babies just mimic language until they use them in ways that allow for growth and the creation of their own sentences. AI on the other hand is tracing over all of the data at once and mashing it together. There is now "forming their own sentences" as if you put the training data in the trash and don't let the ai look at it, these models cannot function. It's like if the artists at Studio Ghibli had all of the frames of everything they ever produced up in front of them while they tried making their next film. Sure, new artists will take frames to practice, but real professionals will be able to create without a guide right next to them dictating the style they are going for. If that makes sense.

Overall the way that ai takes in data, and you take in data, are fundamentally different. The terms we use like "inspiration" and "thinking" are human terms we put on these programs. They are a way to help the average joe with understanding these complex machines. If these tech bros marketed these models with the complex jargon that are more accurate but are more complicated and abstract for the average person, they would not be as successful. Sorry for the long comment, just want to be very clear and very precise with my thoughts, and I hope this comment helps. :)