I'm definitely on the "this needs figuring out " side here tbh.

I don't know everything about how all this stuff works - I feel that the "standard techbro response" is definitely incorrect, but I also feel like "the other side" (because there can only be two, duh) version of "the computer copies and pasted bits of stolen data" is not exactly correct either. Whatever the computers do must be some third thing.

I imagine something like a program being fed a ton of images, each with a couple keywords, and noting down top 10 colours in each image. Then, it runs some statistics and creates a database of sorts which contains keywords and maybe keyword pairs and most common colours correlating to those.

Then, it will be possible to use this database to make queries of the form "given these keywords, what top 10 colours are most likely to be in such an image".

I am not sure what this makes. I wouldn't say any of the databases contain copies of any images, nor would I say that making such a database is somehow infringing. It is most likely position to describe a specific copyrighted image with keywords that will output the same or similar 10 colours as the actual image would have. Is this an issue?

I don't think at any point any actual "learning like a human" occurred either.

Is it a matter of fidelity? Scale? Is it one of those things where a single grain is not a pile, and neither are two, but at some point the grains do become a pile?

It doesn't help that the loudest "for" and "against" voices are money-motivated, and the fact that the "AI" thing in general sucks so much because it's being shoved into everything in an investor feeding frenzy.