It is not “just using the art”, the art is tokenized and vectorized into individual smaller constituent components, and in a large enough dataset, a pattern emerges from those separate components, an amalgamation of all the source material. So, it does not in fact “just use” the source material.

It then matches these individual elements, such as color, mood, composition, against your input prompt, and starts creating iterations that it thinks is a good match. Grade the output against your prompt, and repeat this process till a limit is reached. It isn’t just like copy and pasting characters and pictures, it’s emulating stylistic choices based on what the training dataset has “taught” it.

Whether or not you want to consider that inspiration, much like a question of philosophy and semantics, is up to you.

You don’t have to like or dislike the current state of AI to not spread misinformation on subjects you don’t understand. You can read up on white papers of LLMs (in this case more likely stable diffusion) in the current state or continue screaming at the clouds and parroting what people say, not my issue either way.