ML can do either facsimile or imitation far better than a human mind can.
You seem to be conflating both things and suggesting that ML only does facsimile, which is where the potential legal problems are.
No, it is not. Memorization =! understanding.
I can teach a parrot to spew the times table, good luck getting it to understand how to apply it.
And a parrot is billions upon billions of times more capable than any current AI algos.
AI, like humans, is capable of both imitation and facsimile. It is far superior at both feats.
Your fallacy is that you are noticing AI is superior at facsimile and erroneously assuming it is “not learning”. You are also ignoring the other amazing learning feats of imitation in front of you.
Parrots are lovely animals, but it’s unclear what you think you’ve accomplished by bringing them up. The fact that they are capable of more than just memorization does not differentiate them from advanced AI models, which are rapidly gaining all sorts of abilities.
Polly the parrot would have a hard time producing a picture of Elmo with a light saber in a Superman costume riding a dragon on the moon in the style of Rembrandt (in under 300ms, at least). I also know a parrot couldn’t write a 500 word story about the image.
Diffusion would appear to me to work in much the same way. It doesn't understand what's good ("works", creates acceptable output) or why, but it knows it when it sees it, and has the tools to refine it.
I am pretty sure that GPT-3 is a lot more capable than a parrot in transpiling a function written in Python to Golang, or writing a summary to a tech-magazine article.
Same as StableDiffusion is ALOT more capable than me in drawing, painting and generally making up pretty pictures.