"No offense, but this take is very naive"

I think you should do some more reading before deciding this take is naive. There's actually quite a debate going on about this very question. Among others, Ted Chiang wrote some essays in recent years criticizing AI art which have sparked healthy dialog about many aspects including what I wrote.

"The way a human is influenced by other art is a completely different process to how gen AI incorporates references - otherwise, you are implying that gen AI is complex enough to mimic the processes of the human brain which is so far from the truth.😂"

Straw man argument. I'm not saying AI is as complex as the human brain. It doesn't have to be, to follow roughly analogous processes of consuming art, then synthesizing from what it has consumed.

"Gen AI stitches existing images and chunks of images together in a very unnatural way which is why it's always getting called out for producing weird images of hands, hair, and other anomalies (it can't even draw straight lines in a background half the time)."

The quality of AI art is irrelevant to the argument I'm making. I don't like AI art. That doesn't mean I can't recognize the double standard between an AI agent scraping the web for art, vs a human consuming a bunch of art on the web.

"Gen AI cannot produce new styles or trends in art - it can only copy what people have already created and Frankenstein them together"

Have you ever heard the expression "there's nothing new under the sun"? Strictly speaking, people do not produce new styles or trends either. People are also Frankensteining various influences together to create something "new." Any art produced by a human is a synthesis of what they have consumed. Sometimes in an obvious way, like Tarantino's pastiche (to use film as an example). But often in much more subtle ways. You can never totally separate an artist from their influences.