This isn't a given, it is something that has yet to be decided in this case. (Edit: if you look at studies that look for examples of SD reproductions, the best examples still similar to what a human trying to reproduce the image from memory would create)

> Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention

There are demonstrable differences between different intelligent systems. I have yet to see any demonstration that shows that you can't reproduce human attention with machine. (Though we can't do it yet)

> If you don't recognise it, then answer me - Why can't you paint me a Picasso?

I haven't studied painting or Picasso. There are many people who can paint a Picasso as well as, if not better than, any ML model we have today. There are people who you could take to a gallery show who could go home and reproduce both style and individual works at an equivalent level.

> It learns faster and more accurately than any human,

The word, "faster", here is doing a lot of work. Machine learning can be "faster" in that it can happen in parallel and be scaled to take less time. However humans currently also learn "faster" because they require fewer repetitions or examples to learn. As such, the "learning" derived from a human viewing an image is arguably currently larger.

> Yes. You pay for access.

Is this good faith? I already stipulated that the images are publicly accessible. Are you suggesting that somehow artists should be able to block the AI from viewing a properly licensed instance of a copyrighted image? That pretty much results in a ban on general ai.

If I am a decent human artist who's looked at many Picasso works and spent time studying how to reproduce his style?

Of course I can.

Artists copy each other's styles all the time, dude. You can literally go to Deviant Art (or wherever), scroll through, and point out examples of style copying, often much more glaring that anything I've seen out of a diffusion model.

It has learned to make pixels a particular color to mimic that style, but that's it.

If you don't mind it being as bad as the the result of a Stable Diffusion image being passed on to a half-trained robot arm, sure: extra limbs, even more of a David Cronenberg vibe than Picasso at his weirdest, mixing with mis-attributed ideas from other images that I've associated with the same labels…