You’re somewhat right. The machine learning algorithm tries to replicate the general patterns on the images it’s trained on (so in this case, images of a lot of sneakers). If the algorithm is trained on enough images, it should, to an extent, learn to generalize and “understand” what a sneaker should look like and generate new ones rather than copying images. In my case, there is definitely some memorization going on, based on some shoes looking suspiciously similar to existing shoes, but there is also definitely some design going on not copied from other sneakers.

But it builds the images “pixel by pixel” rather than e.g. taking the sole of one shoe with the upper of another if that’s what you’re asking.