I don't think that thinking of it as "compression" is useful, and more than an artist recreating the Mona Lisa from memory is "decompressing" it. The process th

I don't think that thinking of it as "compression" is useful, and more than an artist recreating the Mona Lisa from memory is "decompressing" it. The process that diffusion models use is fundamentally different to decompression. For example, if you prompt Stable Diffusion with "Mona Lisa" and look at the iterations, it is clearer what is happening - it's not decompressing so much as drawing something it knows looks like Mona Lisa and then iterating to make it look clearer and clearer. It clearly "knows" what the Mona Lisa looks like, but what is is doing isn't copying it - it's more like recreating a thing that looks like it. (And yes I realize lots of artist on Twitter are complaining that it is copying their work. I think "forgery" is a better analogy than "stealing" though - it can create art that looks like a Picasso or whatever, but it isn't copying it in a conventional sense)