The point was that the LAION dataset, on which the model was trained, is static. it was created once and isn't continuously updated - a snapshot of a point in time. The curation was also automated, but biased for the aesthetic score ("how likely would a human find this pretty"). That's why so much art was captured in it. So, if you put an artwork out on the internet today, it will not be used by the current crop of AI art generators. Whether this is "stealing" is a matter of opinion, as all of those images were public and went into a common "melting pot". I was only specifically addressing the "scraping" statement, because there is a lot of misinformation and confusion around that - some people literally seem to think there are bots hiding in the shadows waiting to snatch their works.

Mind you, that is different from someone downloading a specific artist's collection from Artstation and purposely training a checkpoint to specifically imitate that artist. That's shitty and gross, and in my mind definitely amounts to theft and plagiarism, and many in the AI art community agree with me.