@atrielienz the reason they have to use specific licensed material is because they are charging rhe art student and therefore must pay for the materials they provide to the student.
But as a student, you can look at any public art you want and allow it to inform your work as long as you don't copy. So that's another example of the same principle: you must pay to reproduce/distribute someone else's art for money. So we come to the same point: no reproduction, but intake is allowed.
@atrielienz let's look at writing computer code. LLMs used public copyrighted code to get really good at writing code blocks. That's like 85% of my job, but I don't care that they are making me obsolete because that means I can now spend more time figuring out how to do better science.
Artists should do the same. Anything that could be adequately created by thinking of a good text prompt should be done in 10 s and spend the rest of the time on hard creative stuff ๐คทโโ๏ธ