Oh the Ai art generator has no "soul" and it's soy and reddit? This precious art form (illustrating things that other people pay you to, a medium dominated almost entirely by furries, porn, and furry porn) is being destroyed by the evil AI? I'm sorry that the democratization of art creation is so upsetting to you. I've brought dozens of ideas to life by typing words into a prompt and I didn't have to pay someone $300 to do so.
Yes, everyone is inspired by other things when making art. But we bring our own experiences in it and that art evolves.
AI art as it stands today simply takes other people's art and combines them in clever ways. There's no additional layer of experience. There's nothing that evolves the art. It's literally just taking the work of others and claiming it as your own.
This is not really true. This generation of algorithms work by generalizing and condensing ideas into a vector representation, where the similarity between vectors and the dimensions then naturally represent the addition, substraction, and difference of concepts.
As a result, you can quite literally "explain" - or perhaps even make to experience the essence of - concepts to these algorithms that they have never ever encountered, and they can apply them to art.
This is not really different from a human or animal taking inspiration. It's a very similar mechanism, it's just much more primitive. Think of it as a primitive form of intuition.