This doesn't make it moral, nor does this have to be the case. For an extreme example, slavery is always profitable. We see much less of it today through regulations than before. Thing is, we can. It's not hard to tell what's AI and what's not with the right tools, and unless they can prove they have the rights to their models training content this should be banned. Heavy fines just like when they trace art today, or steal it in other more old fashioned ways. That too is more profitable, but rare due to regulation
AI art is new and without regulations as it is we will see the worst possible outcomes. This can be hampered with regulations or broad lack of support by people like us. We can simply reject it. If there is no demand supply will be useless.
Will this slow down progression? Yes. So has banning forced labour in amarica. China and russia had an absurdly quick leap forward heavily utilizing it, does this mean we should re-instate it? If we focus solely on progress at the expense of people we have nothing to progress for.
When mechanization took field work away mechanics jobs, office jobs, and service jobs came up. This took a hard laborious job which damaged a person and allowed people to pursue better jobs. AI only takes, with no benefit to the common person.
This will be beneficial in the long run, cutting this out now. AI is a useful tool but it can't create new techniques or concepts. It needs input. If let to be how it's going it'll stagnate our culture. In capitalism stagnation is death.
We can't feed ai output to an AI either so with the mass proliferation we're getting close to the peak on development even using our current methods. Model collapse is much worse than we thought it would be and we have no solution. Newer models and models trained the same way today are markedly worse.
Opinions change on the scale of a person to another. The real way forward is through conversation and political engagement. People hate to hear it, but this does work. Look at the EU, with their recent acts to regulate AI. Things can be better.
We can track down the horse, we can build fences to stop it from getting too far next time, we can close the barn door to keep the other horses in, we can shoot it and use it for meat if it's too quick. There are ways forward, we don't have to just let this horse run wild.