Using GenAI as references is not the same because you are drawing from the output of something that is already a muddled mess of millions of other images and then: are they painting over it? Are they using that generated piece as a starting point?
This is not inherent to Gen AI. It's also not unique to it.
Plagarism existed way before Gen AI. Where people literally stole other people's work and either used it directly or painted over it.
Again, this is entirely a "Usage" issue not a "Process" issue. It's all about how it is used.
Just like other tools such as photoshop. Yes, you can just steal other people's work and photoshop it and pass it off as your own work, just like you can Gen AI something and trace over it and call it your own. It doesn't make photoshop bad, it just makes bad uses bad.
Gen AI only gets a bad rep because the vast majority of use cases right now have been bad uses of it. Whereby AI art IS the final product (Bypassing use of actual artists entirely), or people have been tracing over it and calling it their own work.
But not all cases are like this.
I think it's ridiculous to not have expected some very loud pushback.
You say that, but there wasn't that big of a deal made out of Arc Raiders and their use of AI. Which was actually involving one of the bad uses of Gen AI. Whereby they used AI to replicated VA's to make generated voice overs for callouts instead of having those VA's actually record said lines.
People just passed it over because "The VA's were apparently cool with it" and Arc Raiders is still one of the most popular games right now and has Overwhelmingly Positive reviews as a result.
