Yes, which is why if you're serious you will exclusively use the terminal to protect your computer from even the passing chance of being exposed to a so called "image file".

In all seriousness, compilation and model training are lossy processes and erase a lot of the context needed to understand the output (and with model training we don't fully understand it even with access to the training data). Images aren't necessarily derivative of anything, so the analogy breaks down here.

At least if you use the Free Software Foundation's definition of free software, one requirement is access to the unobfuscated source code. If every copy of a free-as-in-speech program binary's source code were deleted from existence by a god then the program would become proprietary.

I would say that every image using a proprietary file format is proprietary. If the creator of such an image intends for the image to be otherwise free as in speech (any receiver can inspect, modify, redistribute with and without modification for any purpose), then the image can be made free if the image creator converts the image to a free format.