The key point that is being made is that it you are doing de facto copyright infringement of plagiarism by creating a copy, it shouldn’t matter whether that copy was made though copy paste, re-compressing the same image, or by using AI model. The product being the copy paste operation, the image editor or the AI model here, not the (copyrighted) image itself. You can still sell computers with copy paste (despite some attempts from large copyright holders with DRM), and you can still sell image editors.
However, unlike copy paste and the image editor, the AI model could memorize and emit training data, without the input data implying the copyrighted work. (exclude the case where the image was provided itself, or a highly detailed description describing the work was provided, as in this case it would clearly be the user that is at fault, and intending for this to happen)
At the same time, it should be noted that exact replication of training data isn’t exactly desirable in any case, and online services for image generation could include a image similarity check against training data, and many probably do this already.
Wouldn’t the algorithm that creates these models in the first place fit the bill? Given that it takes a bunch of text data, and manages to organize this in such a fashion that the resulting model can combine knowledge from pieces of text, I would argue so.
What is understanding knowledge anyways? Wouldn’t humans not fit the bill either, given that for most of our knowledge we do not know why it is the way it is, or even had rules that were - in hindsight - incorrect?
If a model is more capable of solving a problem than an average human being, isn’t it, in its own way, some form of intelligent? And, to take things to the utter extreme, wouldn’t evolution itself be intelligent, given that it causes intelligent behavior to emerge, for example, viruses adapting to external threats? What about an (iterative) optimization algorithm that finds solutions that no human would be able to find?
I would disagree, it is probably one of the most hard to define things out there, which has changed greatly with time, and is core to the study of philosophy. Every time a being or thing fits a definition of intelligent, the definition often altered to exclude, as has been done many times.