I would call this "confabulation" more than compression. Its accuracy is proportional to and bounded by the training data; I suspect in practice it's got a spe

I would call this "confabulation" more than compression. Its accuracy is proportional to and bounded by the training data; I suspect in practice it's got a specific strength (filling in fungible detail) and as discussed ITT with fascinating and gnarly corners, some specific failure modes which are going to lead to bad outcomes. At least with "lossy" CODECs of various kinds, even if you don't attend to absence until you do an A/B comparison, you can perceive the difference when you do do those comparisons. In this case the serious peril is that an A/B comparison is [soon] going to just show difference. "What... is... the Real?" When you contemplate that an ever-increasing proportion of the training data itself stems from AI- or otherwise-enhanced imagery, our hold on the real has never felt weaker, and our vulnerability to the rewriting of reality, has never felt more present.