Precisely. So when you say they used the images without permission, you are knowingly making a false implication - that it was known to them that they needed permission and that they intentionally disregarded that fact. In reality that has yet to be legally established.

Who said anything about sacrificing production? The entire point of the tooling is to reduce the production cost to as near zero as possible. If you didn't expect it to work then I doubt you would be so bent out of shape over it.

I find your stance quite perplexing. The tech can't be un-invented. It's very much Pandora's box. Whatever consequences that has for the market, all we can do is wait and see.

Worst case scenario (for the AI purveyors) is a clear legal determination that the current training data situation isn't legal. I seriously doubt that would set them back by more than a couple of years.