That may be true, but that doesn't change the fact that the AI still just took a bunch of images from the internet, some that are NOT copyright free & used them to create whatever you sent here.
Short explanation
AI itself can't generate these images without some kind of prompt or an image example. So, the way the AI creates these images is - it takes hundreds of images of someone's work(or you essentially feed it those images, if your computer is strong enough) which will then basically train it to use them/that artstyle on new images generated from a text prompt. AI, or even people that train these AIs take images from the internet WITHOUT the artist’s consent & use them to generate new images based on their artwork.
Of course this then works even if you were to take an image & use it without a prompt on a model which you've already trained. The more images you feed the AI, the better it can get at recreating said artstyle. For example, Samdoesarts & Greg Rutkowski have a huge problem with this, along with many others. Greg's name was used about 215 000 times between Stability AI & Midjourney AI.
When AI images are made to look like an artists work it has the potential to damage the artist’s reputation, for forgery, fraud, identity theft. Also, when you train an AI to use these images – it WON’T forget.
“If it’s on the internet it’s not theft. You put it on the internet so it’s free to use.” - That’s simply a misunderstanding. Just because someone puts something on the internet it doesn’t mean that it gives you the right to use it for whatever you want without the consent of the person that posted it, especially not for commercial purposes. As long as someone’s art is integrated into the database used to create these images, it is commercial use of said someone’s art without their consent. AI simply takes the image & is able to create perfect replica. Humans cannot – so if you say that the AI just takes inspiration from images like an artist – you’re wrong.