Using stock art is just further appropriation, which is silly considering the intent and licensing of stock artwork is clearly intended by all parties to turn works into commodities for commercial exploitation.

The old ways are best, the new ways are bad and take away the soul from the creation process and resulting works. Also unconvincing considering that most of the people saying that are using radically different, digitized, heavily time optimized art workflows compared to norm of the industry even 30 years ago.

Not that I don't see the problems, the potential for job losses due to the optimizations to workflow requiring less work and therefore less workers is an actual risk, but one that happens regardless of copyright enforcement of AI models. The problems commercialized AI art workflows cause may even be exacerbated by enforcement of copyright on training data by handing a monopoly of all higher quality generative AI models into already entrenched multinational intellectual property rightsholders hands. I think a lot of artists forget that copyright isn't as much for them as it's for the Disneys of the world.