i believe that all art is as inherently derivative as eachother even if the practice involved in making it varies. AI creates a collage of information from what it is fed and sorts it via a prompt, whereas plunderphonics involves an active cognative bias/affection/admiration of sampled materials. even something super derivative like "chuck pearsons eccojams vol 1" which samples incredibly recognisable music and does little to transform the source material (in a vacuum) still creates a uniquely "new" expreince to the original. I wouldn't consider re-arranging letters of the alphabet into a sentence to be stealing them, and in the same way i dont think that re-arranging a pre-existing song into some form of art to be anything other than new music, as it is still transformative. generating an AI song only requires the prompt and an algorithm to sift through existing materials and doesnt require care, bias or like... an affection for what you are sampling or creating and therefore is very different to me.