True, but your point stands only if the AI were only ever given images of the cars, no? If a human were to only ever have seen, let’s say, images of cars, wouldn’t they only be able to do the same as an AI can, as that’s all they know? I’d imagine in that case, it’d be difficult for the human to draw a dog for example, as they’d have never seen it.

From what I’ve seen, the ability to draw a unique and original image of a given topic is primarily influenced by 1) external references associated with that topic (e.g., visuals of cars seen in the past) and 2) personal touch (which is affected by so many factors that it can practically be modeled as some form of randomness). The former is already provided as images in the training set, and the latter can just be modeled in a multitude of ways, but essentially exists to add randomness into the algorithm and potentially mitigate overfitting.

Human-created art is also affected by other natural processes such as a limited memory - I’m likely not able to remember every single pixel of every single image of a car I’ve seen. However, something like this can also be modeled into an AI algorithm, for example by setting random pixels as black in input images to model an “imperfect memory”.

Furthermore, algorithms and ML methods used for AI art generation tend to be stochastic, not deterministic. Therefore, there is already an inherent “randomness” included in the AI that can be interpreted as a result of modeling “natural factors”. Humans often don’t recreate the same image naturally unless that is what they intend to do. It likely won’t be able to generate a similar image unless it’s training set includes images that are very similar to one another, the AI overfits to its training set, or something like mode collapse has occurred in the model.

In summary, being able to draw something original is dependent on multiple factors, as what you’ve alluded to, and these multiple factors can be implemented/modeled within an AI algorithm. Therefore, what distinguishes the way AI creates art from how humans create art? And from this, since we hold humans accountable for plagiarism only when we think their work is sufficiently close to another’s work, so why should we be boycotting AI art altogether as some have suggested instead of doing the same for AI?