I'll be honest, a lot of the conversations I've been having with other artists have actually made me personally a lot more comfortable with using AI. Not because anyone around me supports it, but because their arguments have shifted from "it's sourcing art without permission" to "it doesn't have soul and it's lazy", and imo those aren't real issues. I get the feeling for a lot of people loudly against it, it was less about the art theft that was happening and more about people thinking that art generation had to be difficult to "count". And as someone that regularly struggles with stuff only to be seen as "taking the lazy way out", that rubs me wrong.