Huh? AI labs are routinely spending millions to billions to various 3rd party contractors specializing in creating/labeling/verifying specialized content for pre/post-training.
This would just be one more checkbox buried in hundreds of pages of requests, and compared to plenty of other ethical grey areas like copyright laundering with actual legal implications, leaking that someone was asked to create a few dozen pelican images seems like it would be at the very bottom of the list of reputational risks.
How do you think who's in on that? Not only pelicans, I mean, the whole thing. CEOs, top researchers, select mathematicians, congressmen? Does China participate in maintaining the bubble?
I, myself, prefer the universal approximation theorem and empirical finding that stochastic gradient descent is good enough (and "no 'magic' in the brain", of course).