From what I've gathered AI is more than capable of almost percetly emulating the style of an artist - which seems worse than just regular theft.
Instead of stealing just the fish (elements of a picture), you steal the whole rod (artist's personal style), which allows you to generate more content than the original artist ever could. Commission artists are probably fine, better off even, but popular artists are in a bad spot right now.
"Currently we don't have a way to trace the "genealogy" of generated content, i.e. compute its attribution histogram over the training data. Maybe in the future we will."
This is a key issue. You will get criticism from artists until you fix this.
Instead of stealing just the fish (elements of a picture), you steal the whole rod (artist's personal style), which allows you to generate more content than the original artist ever could. Commission artists are probably fine, better off even, but popular artists are in a bad spot right now.