Fediverse memes

Whilst I agree with your point about strawman arguments in general, that isn't really the case here. The OP explicitly said "It's funny, and it doesn’t hurt anyone" when, in fact, it does. This appears to be their primary justification for using it, whilst ignoring the well known costs of that use. I conceed that a, very charitable, reading of their comment might be that they are simply unaware of the environmental and authorship issues and are only focused on whether their image is "funny" and not directly causing harm. However, those issues are so well known that I, and aparently other commenters, do not feel they can reasonably overlooked in any discussion about whether the use of genai can be justified in general.

The other issues you brought up are very real too and, in many ways, more insidious that the obvious ones discussed before. How we overcome those, now that the genie is out of the bottle, I don't know.