Human artists have been training on the same content for decades and no one seemed to complain. You can argue that machines should be held to a different set of legal and ethical standards, but it's certainly not obvious.

Most factories are designed based on vast amounts of prior manual labor, so it's not like "automating a manual process based on analyzing existing methods" is new, either. Why is it okay to automate the knowledge of all those other craftsmen, but not that of painters?

AI are not human artists, so there's no connection to your point and the discussion.

you are just making shit up to suit your narrative at this point.

So ai are human artists?

You could just as easily claim that since AI are not human artists that copyright does not apply to them.

It applies to whoever uses them as a tool. If you say copyright doesn't apply to a photocopier because it isn't human that doesn't mean it suddenly doesn't apply to you. It's just a bad argument.

Human artists are not robotically ingesting terabytes of content.

Correct, not at all obvious. The obvious effect of generating an image of a dog on the moon is that you now have an image of a dog on the moon. If you showed it to 100 artists, some percentage of them might recognize it's AI, but none of them would claim it as their art and ultimately none would be harmed. The harm is non-obvious.