Except an AI is not taking inspiration, it's compiling information to determine mathematical averages.

The AIs we're talking about are neural networks. They don't do statistics, they don't have databases, and they don't take mathematical averages. They simulate neurons, and their ability to learn concepts is emergent from that, the same way the human brain is. Nothing about an artificial neuron ever takes an average of anything, reads any database, or does any statistical calculations. If an artificial neural network can be said to be doing those things, then so is the human brain.

There is nothing magical about how human neurons work. Researchers are already growing small networks out of animal neurons and using them the same way that we use artificial neural networks.

There are a lot of "how AI works" articles in there that put things in layman's terms (and use phrases like "statistical analysis" and "mathematical averages", and unfortunately people (including many very smart people) extrapolate from the incorrect information in those articles and end up making bad assumptions about how AI actually works.

A human being is paid for the work they do, an AI program's creator is paid for the work it did. And if that creator used copyrighted work, then he should be having to get permission to use it, because he's profitting off this AI program.

If an artist uses a copyrighted work on their mood board or as inspiration, then they should pay for that, because they're making a profit from that copyrighted work. Human beings should, as you said, be paid for the work they do. Right? If an artist goes to art school, they should pay all of the artists whose work they learned from, right? If a teacher teaches children in a class, that teacher should be paid a royalty each time those children make use of the knowledge they were taught, right? (I sense a sidetrack -- yes, teachers are horribly underpaid and we desperately need to fix that, so please don't misconstrue that previous sentence.)

There's a reason we don't copyright facts, styles, and concepts.

Oh, and if you want to talk about something that stores an actual database of scraped data, makes mathematical and statistical inferences, and reproduces things exactly, look no further than Google. It's already been determined in court that what Google does is fair use.