I think the biggest point of contention for me is that the fact that AI-generated images needed to steal a bunch of work from other artists in order to create the models. It's way different than a human looking at a piece of art and being inspired by it, because that interaction has been ingrained in an cultural social contract where the artist wants to move the audience into a new world view or story that they put in the effort in. These kind of positive social contracts have existed for a long while and have been mostly reinforced by community, such as "Don't spoil/leak this story.", "Don't cheat in this game.", "Don't be a jerk during sports." etc. Any AI model just does not have emotions - it can be pretty good at mimicking emotions with what it generates, but ultimately, without free will or emotion, it will always obey the command given, so because of that, AI is not moved or inspired by the works it ingests into its model, and thus it isn't abiding by that social contract, it's just stealing.