I struggle to see how this is different from another artist eyeing then aping their style. The choice would be to not show other humans the art basically.

It's not about copying their style, the main difference is AI companies making revenue training their systems on other people's work, while the original artists are not being compensated for helping train their systems.

By and large, the original artists did not help train the systems.

Engineers figured out how to scrape sites, decode and filter tags, classify images, and feed them into the training dataset.

All the original artist did was publish an image online to be seen by other people.

It'd be like Google compensating people for putting things online that the search engine links to.

Google provides value to the sites it links to by sending them traffic, how does an AI company provide value to the artist by using their work to train their systems? I don't see how your analogy works.

if you want an isolated example, there are several digital artists i had never heard of before stable diffusion started appearing in headlines and articles like this. out of curiosity, i installed sd and ran some prompts to see how well it actually emulated their styles. i was impressed enough that i ended up buying a print from one of the artists

Don't allow photos of the art?

If you use someone else's work to generate revenue, you should have permission from that person and/or that person should be compensated. It doesn't matter if it's a complex ML algorithm imo.