I don't think the question is really about whether AI art is real art. (But it could be about that, as I'm not familiar with commercial cons in the US.)

Some years ago, around the time I became aware that AI art is a thing, the artist scene around Finnish cons had already decided to ban it. And the reason was obvious, as the same people are also very eager to police others who might be selling pirated products.

They don't care legal constructs such as intellectual property. They don't really care about economic constructs such as copyright. What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.

> What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.

Art is not created in isolation. It is a result of the artist's exposure (aka training), both intentional and incidental. If an artist wants an AI model to get permission before training on their work, then the artist should get permission from all the artists they were exposed to that shaped their artistic expression.

It's training and copying all the way down.

AI generative art doesn't exist by definition. You cannot generate art. Actually we have a term for this - kitsch.