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Sampling is sampling, it's very different from plagiarism.

Just because you can't trace what elements have been cobbled together to make the image does not mean it wasn't stolen without the artist's explicit consent. (And I'm not talking strictly legal, "click the box to accept our terms and conditions" consent here.)

Your third paragraph is just irrelevant to the ethical question here - and a tiresome and illogical argument. "Some people in the past were wrong about some new technology, so everyone critical of some aspect of a new technology is obviously wrong". But I'm not taking the Luddite stance, in this particular argument at least, so it's not a relevant criticism anyway.