isn't AI art kind of stolen to begin with? What kind of meaningful skill or effort or unique touch can a person possibly claim on this process.

Not my art. I'm a 3D CGI artist. I've been doing this for decades. My art is mostly photoshop. I spend hours, sometimes days drawing these. I showed some before and after pictures and explained my process way down on this thread somewhere. i will stitch images together, clone and paint and layer in details. I will get the image to 95% complete, then upscale it using an AI upscaler. tinker with the results blending together the best copies. it takes a huge amount of skill. So my work is maybe 5% AI.