It's generally not gone over well when it's discovered that an artist has been copying composition, poses, etc from pre-existing work of the same type. Manga and comic artists for example have had their careers derailed over it.

Stylistic mimicry is more murky, partially because humans aren't as good at cloning styles — inevitably the clone will take on some influence from the one doing the copying, which isn't true of AI. If you ask the AI to draw X in the style of Y artist, it's going to be a dead-on copy of Y artist's style.

Why do we make analogies to people? Machines have no rights of expression or inherent freedoms. There is no "learning", we're not "teaching" the machine anything. It boils down to heuristics and statistics. Imagine we're in the 1930s with no computers: If I were to study every every Agatha Christie book and write my own based on statistical likelihoods of words, characters, plot elements etc. I would be seen as a copy-cat hack-fraud author or worse. If I were to take inspiration of the crime/thriller/detective genre and write my own story in my own universe then I would be simply an author within the same genre.

ChatGPT/"ML" copy the fine details. We're getting artists signatures turn up in generated work... That's not inspiration, and I would argue not even transformative.