>>It's not a search engine that outputs the training item closest to the prompt.
Correct, it is not outputting the training ITEM, it is outputting finer-grained slices of many items, more of a mash-up of the training items.
Of course it is not taking an entire specific image the closely matches the search term, it is taking averages of component images of "astronaut riding a horse over the moon in style of Rembrandt".
That image won't exist in the training set, but astronauts, horses, and Rembrandt-style coloring and shading do exist, and it is assembling those from averages of the components found it's training set, not from some abstract imagination or understanding.
The fact that the astronaut suit may not be the exact same as any of it's training images is the same as if I averaged 100 faces in photoshop, not because there is some kind of "learning" or "understanding". Ability to do useful statistical mashups is NOT the same as "learning".
This can be shown in a different "AI" engine'd failure to solve a child's puzzle. ChatGPT, when presented with: "Mike's mom had four kids, three are named Lucia, Drake, and Kelly, what is the fourth kid's name?". It said there is insufficient info, and doubled down when told that the answer is in the question.
>>how to correlate text to images
yes, as I pointed out, "correlating with the prompt." I didn't say it correlated an entire image, but I also failed to specify that it was correlating components.
>> If this is legal for humans to do, then it's probably legal for machines to do the same thing.
This [0] is I'm quite sure, not legal. Asked for an image of a person named "Ann Graham Lotz", it returned the image in the training set, slightly degraded.
First, that is literally the search engine functionality you were deriding.
Second, if you asked a human artist to produce the same image, without infringing copyright, they would produce something likely recognizable as the person, but obviously not resembling the training photo. It doesn't matter if they are a portrait painter, sketch artist, Photoshop jockey, or Picasso-like impressionist.
So, no, this does not represent learning in any conceptual, creative, or human-like sense.
It does represent mashing-up averages of inputs of various components. Feed in enough "astronaut" photos, and it'll be able to select out the humans in the spacesuit as the response to that prompt. Same for "horse", "moon", "riding", and "Rembrandt". and it can mash them together into something useful with good prompts.
But give it something very specific, like a person's name, and you get basically a search-engine result, because it doesn't have enough input data variety to abstract out the person 'object' from the background.
[0] https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-ai-based-image-generatio...