Educating people about such a technical topic seems very difficult especially since people get emotional of their work being used.
I know because I'm literally working on setting up Dreambooth to do what I'd otherwise have to pay an artist to do.
And not only is it replacing artists, it's using their own work to do so. None of these could exist without being trained on the original artwork.
Surely you can imagine why they're largely not happy?
In this case, technologists figured out how to exploit people's work without compensating them. A camera is possible without the artists it replaces. Generative modeling is not. It's fundamentally different.
If people figured out how to generate this kind of art without exploiting uncompensated unwilling artists' free labor, it would be a different story.
Is it? Or does the idea of a photo presuppose the painting? Could a camera have been invented by someone not looking at the world through the lens of a very particular tradition of art?
And the "idea" of a frozen, materialized, two dimensional projection of what we see with our eyes, aka an image, transcends cultures and tools.
It does not depend on a particular tradition of art. You might argue that it depends on human culture, but that's a different thing.
Also, making a portrait photo does not need concrete instances of portrait paintings.
So I don't really follow your argument.
Also, yes, I'd say the invention if the camera could be motivated by reasons that have nothing to do with art at all (documenting the physical world). The lines get blurry depending on how you define "art".
But none of that implies that the invention of the camera depends on recycling prior art.
An image AI is incapable of depicting something that's entirely missing from its training data.