This is how I handle pirating. I more or less treat pirating as a demo for the game. If I liked the game enough to finish it, 9/10 times I’m going to actually buy it unless I have some personal reason not to, like the dev being a pos I don’t wish to support or something.
AI art has a very real place in current society. It’s very useful, and is absolutely going to get better and become a normal part of the future. We’re not going to avoid it, so we should work on making AI less morally fucked. The technology isn’t the problem, the people behind it are. Rather than stealing art, the multi-million/billion-dollar companies behind these models need to pay artists for every single piece of art they use in their models.