Lapis lazuli? Maybe not, but lithium mines are a constant source of criticism for those reasons, and your simplification of the world to an either or scenario is incredibly disingenuous.
If you think that people like Da Vinci and Michaelangelo had nothing to say, then you know nothing about artists. Da Vinci hated the Pope who commissioned the Sistine Chapel so much that he painted him burning in Hell directly behind the altar. He was a gay man who had relationships with his apprentices and performed illegal autopsies on bodies to study the human anatomy during a time when it was considered descecrating the dead, which formed the foundation of modern medicine's understanding of the human body.
You're just making excuses so you feel better about stealing the labor of others.
Good thing that's not something I said, then. So what you're doing is arguing a point that nobody said in order to reframe the actual argument into something different. Making excuses to avoid confronting the actual argument.
So do I. But if you're doing that with an LLM made by a company that's using unethically sourced training data to avoid paying the artists who made the art used for training, then you're buying into a system that exploits workers for your own convenience and that makes the art bad. AI slop isn't just slop because of the quality. It's also because it's wage theft. People respect the shitty napkin drawing more because, regardless of the quality, it shows that you were willing to put in the effort without the fancy tools while also not committing a corporation in the process.