but it has already stolen work already done by artists and further stealing upcoming work by mashing together older works.
You keep using that word "stolen", I do not think it means what you think it means.
Also, AIs do not "mash together" works from their training sets. This is a very common and very incorrect conception of how they work. They are not collage generators or copy-and-paste machines. They learn concepts from the images they train on, they don't actually remember fragments of those images to later regurgitate in some sort of patched-together Frankenstein's Monster.