Human artists create with intent. Statistical image generation throws paint at a million walls and keeps the handful that are statistically close to images tagged with words in a prompt.

That's not the same thing, and there's a reason why all of those generated images seem... off.

I think we may be talking about two different concepts regarding creation of art.

Absolutely humans (and myself, I'm a professional illustrator) use a mental patterns to come up with ideas.

The physical difference in AI generation is the lack of butt-in-chair time of the flow state. Painting/drawing/rendering art is not just mindless time to be compressed; it's a mental/physical/emotional/(and some would say spiritual) flow state with a lot of "input" abstractions beyond the patterns. Things like the creative's personal mood, personal past experiences, recent discussions with friends, recent texts they read ... those all fold into it. I wouldn't trade that flow state for the world, and it absolutely leaves fingerprints in my creations.

so you say what disqualifies AI is that it's a lot faster than humans at doing the same task

That’s definitely part of it, yeah. There’s other factors too, but that’s obviously one of the big ones.

So what? FurAffinity’s stated goal with the ban is to protect human artists. Obviously banning something that undermines human artists is a step towards that goal. If you want a place to show your AI art, there are plenty of other sites that will welcome you.

Neither does the AI, so what’s the point?

Yes, if you look hard enough you’ll find some. But that’s true on either side.

When humans copy verbatim, even only partially, there are consequences unless it's fair use.

If someone notices. There's no guarantee that anyone will, even the person doing it. I've certainly done my fair share of verbatim copying -- something I only realised weeks later, if ever.

neither does AI. They don't operate in pixel space, but in latent space, which is the same as a mental model and the neural networks that do this even have a lot in common with how our visual cortex works. The conversion to pixel only happens in the last step when the concept has been generated as mental model (latent representation). They're doing the same thing human designers do, just orders of magnitude faster.