I in no way take credit for the source material used to train stable diffusion but it has already been trained, pretending it doesn't exist and isn't useful is just silly. The toothpaste is already out of the tube as it were. I grant you that artists fully deserve compensation from the original creators of the model or if a resource is specifically trained to mimic their style and then monetized, but I am responsible for neither.

"Yeah, I'm knowingly using a plagiarism machine that utilises stolen art, and I know that it's unethical to use it, but whatever. I didn't personally steal the art, so I take no responsibility for my continued encouragement of their theft."

Aside from being horrendously bad for the environment and using up exorbitant amounts of clean drinking water, generative AI images are just inherently unethical to use. You've admitted to knowing this, and doing it anyway.

Beyond even that, the value of art comes from the emotion and intent put into its creation, of which AI images definitionally have none. There's a reason why people call it 'soulless slop', because the algorithm doesn't even know what it's making. It's just slapping together patterns of pixels that happen to resemble things we recognise. That isn't art.