this new image gen stuff would be way cooler if the space was tagged with links to the source images, so when you find something neat you could follow it back to the original artists
Whether or not you or I approve, that's not technically feasible. It's not a Photoshop cut-and-paste job. The system learns by seeing in a way analogous to us.
You can absolutely tell someone where your influences come from. Even if there’s a load of unconscious stuff you can often give pointers. And people can also figure it out based on who you associate with etc even if you choose not to share.
At the scale of these models it’s a massive soup of stuff that erases all association with the original context, artists, and people who worked their asses off to create the training images. The context is entirely different from an individual artist.