Comment by jwells89

Imitation isn’t the problem so much as it is that ML generated images are composed of a mush of the images it was trained on. A human artist can abstract the concepts underpinning a style and mimic it by drawing all-new lineart, coloration, shading, composition, etc, while the ML model has to lean on blending training imagery together.

Furthermore there’s a sort of unavoidable “jitter” in human-produced art that varies between individuals that stems from vastly different ways of thinking, perception of the world, mental abstraction processes, life experiences, etc. This is why artists who start out imitating other artists almost always develop their imitations into a style all their own — the imitations were already appreciably different from the original due to the aforementioned biases and those distinctions only grow with time and experimentation.

There would be greatly reduced moral controversy surrounding ML models if they lacked that mincemeat/pink slime aspect.