It's not about copyright, that's a burgeois invention. It's about attribution and alienation, with AI the act of working (creating the images that feed the neural network) is completely decoupled from the product (whatever the giant heap of linear algebra cobbles together). That's the issue, not some capitalist's loss of rent-seeking opportunities.
As a (bad) hobby level artist, I'm well aware my art is probably best described as mashing together other's actual human work. But I kind of think that's true for everyone. You always see influences and borrowed concepts from other's past works in new art. If your work is posted publicly, you can't be surprised when another artist sees it and is inspired by it.
In my opinion, we already have copyright protection against AI art, it's the same you would use against anyone else. If you can show that the generated artwork is a derivative work, it's a problem and they've violated your copyright.
But that is how ai image generators work. I don't know every piece of art or every photograph ever taken, but I know that ai image generators work by mashing them together.
You're being obtuse. The evidence is the AI itself. It is trained on existing pictures and doesn't just "dream up some art". Its all copied and pasted from somewhere. If you actually knew how the tech worked you would know this. But I suspect you actually do and are arguing in bad faith.