"Pixel Art" (Art by 8pxl)

This is obviously straight up stealing but it's not like many artists haven't been caught tracing. Saying that imagegen AI in general just copies existing artwork like this is just misinfo.

Reality is bad enough, we don't need to make things up (even if I don't think it's intentional here). Gobbling up artwork without the artists permission to then make money off it is more than enough.

So it's probably taken a specific image as input so it's the user doing it intentionally, which is really no different to using illustrator or something to trace.

(Also when AI generation first hit mainstream people on tumblr were doing this a lot to "show" that AI was stealing art directly)

And even then, other than the composition it's still a fairly different image.