The analogy doesn't hold when you consider the sheer scale of the problem. I can outright buy a machine for a few thousand dollars that can crank out a faithfu

The analogy doesn't hold when you consider the sheer scale of the problem. I can outright buy a machine for a few thousand dollars that can crank out a faithful rewrite of every Stephen King novel without the shitty endings and nonsense plot points. It can do it in a few days, maybe a couple of weeks at most. To do that with human labor would take years and cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. Instead of paying an artist a couple hundred for a commissioned drawing, I can just scrape up their entire portfolio and generate any image I want with their style. I can generate hundreds or thousands of images. I can take their distinct style and use it exclusively as the branding for my company. What a ML model does is very fundamental not what happens when a human draws inspiration from prior art. A human would require an extremely significant amount of time and resources to perfectly imitate every artist they have ever seen. It takes a human significant time and resources to produce faithful variations on prior art. A ML model is measured in words or images per second.