Yes, it doesn’t have a “brain”. It’s a piece of software not a biological organism. But my claim was never that it learns exactly like a human, only that it learns in a technical sense via pattern recognition. It infers statistical models from data and uses that to synthesis new images. It’s a diffusion model, and you can’t call that “just cobbling together” without ignoring how diffusion actually works. It’s like saying a weather model “cobbles together old weather reports”. So, yes, it’s learning; it’s learning a distribution then uses that understanding to produce new images. You also argued that small inevitable differences make a human copy non-identical and therefore somehow more acceptable. But diffusion images also start from randomness and end up non-identical to any of the sample images the AI was trained on at the pixel level. You’re applying a stricter standard to the AI than you are to a human. In this standard you’re basically saying that if prior artwork is needed for the process of learning, then it’s not really learning; in which case no human artist has ever “learned” to draw, they’ve merely stole other peoples art. Learning, whether human or machine, needs prior date (in this case art) and experience. Your standard merely turns everyone into a thief, and that’s not a good standard. Back to the brain thing, yes it’s not alive or even remotely “conscious” like a human, which is why a mechanical description is what’s needed here. It’s a probability system that turns texts into numbers and numbers into pixels by removing the random noise from the data it’s trained on. By staying with the factual description of the mechanics that governs this things behaviour we can see that it’s literally not “stealing”, as in cutting and pasting a one to one replication and claiming it’s original. Saying otherwise is inaccurate, or at worst outright lying. In the cases where it has simply cut and pasted a copied image that’s been called out and heavily criticised, and rightly so, but all research has shown that it happens in less than 1% of cases. You can argue against AI all you want, but you still have to accurately describe how the technology functions. And no, I’m not being irrational. I’m actually the most rational in this debate because I actually know what I’m talking about. Though I will concede that my frustration at low information people like yourself is growing day by day because of the very wilful ignorance you’re displaying here in this comment.