Is AI art actually theft, or just another medium?

I watched this video about how stable diffusion was trained on millions of copyrighted images without consent — but then I see artists using it as a tool for ideation and mood boarding, which feels

I keep coming back to this because I've been on both sides of it. I'm a digital painter and there is absolutely nothing wrong with using AI for reference images or texture generation—that workflow has saved me dozens of hours over the last year alone. But my friend does commercial illustration work and got hit really hard when a client used an image generator instead of commissioning him, and that loss isn't going to be covered by any tech loophole.

I think the honest answer is both: it's another medium with legitimate use cases AND there are real systemic problems about how training data was scraped without consent. We can support creators who use AI as a tool while also pushing for models trained on licensed datasets. The two aren'