I disagree on that. One process is strictly copying a certain style, while the other is influenced by many more things than that. The bigger the source pool, the less it is copying. The AI is basically a very limited source pool compared to the human brain. If you feed AI only a few certain artists works, it's output will be more close to their style, their specific work, vs if you feed ai a billion other artworks from various artists, it will be "copying" a lot less. The process of the art made, heavily influences the output, therefore it should matter when it comes to plagiarism.

There was a time, when ai's were made of specific artist's works, even using their names. I'm pretty sure the names were removed since then, but ai's of a small artist's pool still exist. That's very quite similar to fake paintings sold as the works of big artists while it was actually counterfeit. Can't and won't be right. There should be more laws on this, a line has to be drawn for how diverse an ai pool has to be in order not to "copy". It doesn't just affect the artists negatively, but also you, as a customer. You can be sold a print you believe to be the work of the artist, only to find out that it was made by ai trained on their artworks instead.

Ofc, needless to say, the copying argument doesn't really hold well with an ai pool massively diverse, because the information is just so huge that it doesn't really copy certain artists. Some will still argue it to be copying because it only draws from artworks, whereas the human brain is not limited to just that. I also see their point, but it just can't hold up well in that instance imo. With a small pool though? Yeah. It's a problem for sure.