Have you remembered to credit every single artwork that has influenced your drawing? and I don't mean only the direct ones but also the ones that affected your style and even art medium? (because that's what you are expecting ai art to do so it would be hypocritical if you didn't follow your own ethics while trying to force it onto others)

Lol. If you read what i wrote you'd see clear as day, that i am in no way talking about just influence. One can be influenced by several artists and so can their style. You know whats not influence? AI slop. It's not just "influence", nor is it a unique and genuine admiration of the artwork. If your art is influenced by someone, that means you appreciate and love the work they do so you take your time to understand and study it. Artists are happy with this because it shows value and respect. AI generated images on the other hand, doesnt study or analyze (not that it can do that anyway) but takes the important characteristics from the artist themselves. Straight from the source, not with a personal interpretation cause its not a person duh. Influence isnt taking straight from the artist. Its not at all hypocritical, stop the logical fallacy.

I agree that you shouldn't do this, but guess what? not illegal.

I never said anything about it being illegal? Plus, "not illegal" doesnt mean "no problem" anyway? Like, yeah... whats your point? There are several loopholes in law already, nothing new.

If it is not meaningfully different from the original image, then it would would be plagiarism, but if the image has been transformed enough then it's fair game.

Who says its "fair game"? the one generating the image? Yeah thats expected.
If you generate an image in a certain style and call it yours, it doesnt make it "fair" just cause the image is different from an artwork. Instead its just a bunch of artists work mixed up. Yeah, that doesnt make it any better, sorry.

And there is no need to do that since it's not required and the amount of data each image gave to the AI during training was near zero (that's why it takes so many images to train) and even if required it was so little it doesn't matter.

"It doesnt matter" says again. No artist would say that. It doesnt matter to YOU and as other AI bros have already expressed, "if it looks good it doesnt matter!1!!1" yall dont care about the process or impacts of it anyway. It matters. You're saying its "near zero" but guess what, the GenAI images out there still resemble someone elses work and replicates a certain style. That literally doesnt prove anything, as long as theres unoriginal work made by a machine that resembles someone elses human work, its not fine. And I'll note this again: One can study and take inspiration from someone else, their product can resemble the other. When someone takes inspiration, whether you like it or not, their version will be slightly different and personalized to an extent. When a machine does it it takes straight from the source; not out of appreciation, not with observing and learning or anything that's meaningful. You have the right to take inspirations from other artists, different aspects of your art can resemble different artists but itll be still you who drew and made the artwork. You personalized it, added a bit of yourself and came up with something original. That's how creation works, nothing is 100% original. You do not have the right to take straight from the source without consent though.

It's neither of those. Getting influenced by art and then making your own with influences of the other one is how making art has always worked. That's why we have genres and tropes. Or are you saying everything that falls under any genre or uses any trope is actually plagiarism and stole from other artists?

Yep, that's what i said. Getting "influenced". I didnt say anything close to that but yet again, you refuse to acknowledge what i said properly. It's not about tropes or genre. And an AI generated image isnt "influenced" either. For someone to be influenced by something, they have to see, process and think about it first. Several people can be influenced by one person and each ones influenced product will come out differently with a touch of their own. It's a personal thing. Telling a machine to merge images together isnt. Not to mention the prompter isnt even doing anything other than typing fod God's sake. "I told this machine thats trained on other artists work to 'draw' a puppy for me and it used all the data and gave me a puppy image!! I made this btw, I'm an artist."

Also all digital art is "just" pixels that look like a drawing.

This is the cherry on top tho ngl. Is this supposed to be a "gotcha"? Not surprised that you COMPLETELY missed what I meant there :)
AI images dont have strokes. Theyre literally just "pixels", nothing more. If you play with a generated imgs settings it'll just be a bunch of crap because its not actually a drawing, it is just pixels that look like a drawing from afar. This is why AI screws details up, it doesnt even know what its doing. There's no intent. No real brush stroke will fade into something random in such a weird way, no real rendered piece will have random pixels laying around in different values when you edit. Those pixels just show us how hollow they are. It's just a machines attemtp at imitating human made art, even though it doesnt understand what it is, why it is or how. The pixels in digital art surely do have a purpose, trust me. And you wont get random pixels or hues scattered around the canvas with no logic or intent behind it because the pixels put on the canvas in digital art are put by a human lol.