The widely available image generators accessible to your average person absolutely weren't advanced enough to make these kinds of images in 2020. The best you could get would be Dall-E (not Dall-E 2, which released in 2022 and was the first publicly available image generator that could meet the standard of those backgrounds)
Here's an article from 2020 showing advanced image generation at the time in a photorealistic style https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/25/1008921/ai-allen-institute-generates-images-from-captions/
And here's one from 2021 showing Dall-E's illustrations https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55559463
They're absolutely nothing like Rai's backgrounds. Sure, they could've had access to an extremely advanced, hidden-from-the-world image generation model the likes of which wouldn't be seen for years... but come on. This is much more easily explained by just... stylization, art errors, visual shortcuts. Focus on the accusations with actual weight here, the tracing.
Re: SA
Here's an article from 2020 showing advanced image generation at the time in a photorealistic style https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/25/1008921/ai-allen-institute-generates-images-from-captions/
And here's one from 2021 showing Dall-E's illustrations https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55559463
They're absolutely nothing like Rai's backgrounds. Sure, they could've had access to an extremely advanced, hidden-from-the-world image generation model the likes of which wouldn't be seen for years... but come on. This is much more easily explained by just... stylization, art errors, visual shortcuts. Focus on the accusations with actual weight here, the tracing.