The difference is that when humans take existing things and remix them to attempt a new thing, it usually looks good but makes a lot of stupid and terrible people mad. When AI does it, it looks terrible and makes a lot of stupid and terrible people happy.
Bad Art (whatever the fuck that means) is allowed to exist. Someone's shitty drawing is still art even if it's not objectively "good".
'AI' systems might get better (or already are) at making art that looks "good" but they still will be unethical because of the way they're built and why they exist in the first place. Most of those tools aren't built in a "let's help artists be more efficient" mindset but in a "you won't need to pay an artist anymore, instead pay us 20 bucks a month so we can use our model built with stolen work".
That's the issue.
i think it's also important to realize that AI basically only learns from being given more data, it can only learn from its own results if a human is hand tweaking it, and if you feed it back its own work unfiltered it's just like feeding an animal its own shit. it's totally valid to produce bad art for its own sake, but often the point of making bad art is to get better at making art with practice. AIs do not experience practice like we do.
Another thing is, AI simply doesn't learn like humans do. Humans learn techniques and concepts and ideas, and introduce their own concepts and ideas and habits, even when copying other artists (as people who learn often do). Compare Raphael's semi-early paintings with his teachers', Perugino's. Perugino's influence is clearly visible and yet Raphael still brings in his own judgement, even when portraying the same subject.
AI art, as far as I understand, is basically a more complex version of Picrew (you know, head, hair, torso, etc) with a bunch of probabilistic data influenced by other paintings and tags/words/tokens. This is why, for what I understand, making the AI actually adjust the art (outside of regenerating one of the Picrew-editor-regions) is impossible. This is why an AI can sometimes throw a hissy fit when you ask it to draw something it hasn't seen before, even if the words are perfectly understandable.
