Being opaque to human understanding is one of the downsides of existing AI/ML tech, for sure. Check out to the video in the page, and notice how the images tran

Being opaque to human understanding is one of the downsides of existing AI/ML tech, for sure. Check out to the video in the page, and notice how the images transition from random color blobs to increasing detail - that's showing you how the image is being generated. It's a continuous process of trying to satisfy a prediction, there are no discrete editing steps. The kind of tech you're imagining, where the computer has semantic understanding of what's in the picture, and is reproducing something based on a 3D scene, knowledge of physics, materials, etc is probably decades away. In that sense yes, this is just a 'trick'.