Um, it's extremely comparable. You basically just described the human process, but used bigger numbers lol.

Go on any art site, whether it's drawings or writing, and a massive amount of the human learning and inspiration you see is just copying from others, too. People drawing their favorite characters, writing fan fiction that copies from their favorite books, etc.

This is so extremely comparable to AI it's weird to me that you don't see it.

They're not amalgamations. They're not collages. The algorithm isn't memorizing the training data.

Look I consider myself an artist, and am very creative. But the vast majority of art and artists are following after other's previous work. It's really not that unique, and frankly why AI can generate some things so well - because everybody's doing it!

Artists who focus on truly new art aren't "in some AI" because it's unique or not easily reduced to some model weights.

The economics of all this are challenging for graphic artists and illustrators for sure!

Source that they are not?

I agree that the scale is different, but even the way you’ve phrased it sounds pretty comparable to how humans learn and produce art. Besides scale, how is it different?