we’ll just pay artists to produce training data en masse’.

If they want to make sure it was actually drawn specifically for them and not generated by other AI or stolen from internet, they’ll need to ask timeline of work. And people doing commissions like this with also timeline provided will ask considerable payment. The smallest I’d expect is like maybe 30$ per small drawing of beginners. But it might as well be 300$ or more per drawing for pro works. Even with 30$, are they really able to pay that? How many drawings they need? Can they spend millions on this?

Maybe it’s just your subscriptions? I don’t feel the same way. Just curate your list more actively and make sure to browse communities from global pool of instances.