"convincing enough to be a forgery" was the deliberate choice of phrase not "forgery". An illustrator who spent many unpaid hours to hone their craft should get to enjoy the fruits of their hard work. A kid with a GPU and a model who trains it on that artist's corpus is
stealing, not "learning". Every illustration from that model is theft.
Even if you don't find the moral argument convincing (and you should), legally protecting creators will encourage creativity, which is the whole point of copyright, while allowing anyone with a laptop to coopt their work will discourage it.