That said, I hope no one is arguing it's ok for these companies to be stealing artwork or photos, because they are. Every one of the big Generative AI houses uses images as part of their business that they don't have permission to have--just nabbed off the internet. Because a Neural Net is a complex combination of literally all the images in their possession, the output is affected by all the images simultaneously.  Lawsuits from copyright holders are in progress because of this.  Here's a realistic AI picture of a horse.  Link.  Where do you suppose it got the training data?

The only reason you can tell Stable Diffusion to make something "in the style of Ralph McQuarrie" is because it has literal image files of McQuarrie art in it's possession it's using to directly drive the software.  I'm pretty sure Lucasfilm/Disney thinks it owns that stuff.  If the AI didn't have it as source material, it literally couldn't do what was asked.  If these companies didn't have enormous numbers of images tagged "AIRPLANE", they could not make you any pictures of airplanes that it recombobulates to fit your request.

There are many possible abuses of this technology, due to it's enormous power, more than Michael enumerated above. Keeping these companies from stealing copyrighted material would a good place to start. Any images they use should either be in the Public Domain, donated, or paid for/licensed from consenting creators.  I hope no one thinks this is too much to ask?