There might be an ethical space in which AI imagery can exist, but consent is a direly needed component. The typical argument against this is that human artist

There might be an ethical space in which AI imagery can exist, but consent is a direly needed component. The typical argument against this is that human artists and ML models learn the same way, but the problem is that there's a fundamental difference: humans produce art by abstracting the concepts (think directional lighting, the kinematics of skeletal creatures, color theory, or physics of cloth) from the pieces they've studied and combining that with what they've learned from observing the world around them and by producing original art. This is why a human artist can produce competent art after studying only a handful of art pieces and gain most of their skill through practice. By contrast, ML models do not learn by producing and have no way to directly observe the world. They don't abstract concepts, they "learn" by memorizing huge numbers of pre-existing images, and they produce images by patching together tiny bits and pieces of of those memorized images. Where the human artist can function on little to no input, an ML model cannot, and so it's only fair that human artists have the choice to not have their works included in training datasets because if there is no feedstock of art there is no AI generated imagery.