Some people are definitely getting a bit carried away when they see cool results from this modern deep learning stuff, and anthropomorphising the machines... But you are going the other way, grossly oversimplifying and not doing the tech justice.. A lot of the cool shit we are seeing nowadays (including midjourney which made these images) would fall under the umbrella of "deep learning"
You should read up on it its super interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning

In general I would say intelligence is made of a whole bunch of different modules, each one being on a continuum. So where would you draw the line?
One could make your argument about humans..
"
Stop calling it Intelligent. It's meat.
It picks & chooses things people have made, filters them then mashes them together according to a bunch of neurons.
There's no intelligence behind it. It can't really create anything.
"
If we continue to improve AI and it continues to progress up the continuum in various ways then your argument will slowly approach that level of silliness.

"If we continue to improve AI and it continues to progress up the continuum in various ways then your argument will slowly approach that level of silliness." But it's not silly *now*. Right now these things are some cool tech that also happen to be plagiarism laundering devices. If they were transparent and allowed you to 'undo' the processes to see all the art it was directly lifting and stirring into the algorithm soup, it would be a lot clearer to a lot more people what's going on - but the people who make them won't do that because they'll get their asses sued off.

@poorwil Midjourney is not a very good example imo. It's a for-profit thing where the makers looked at some interesting recent open source developments, and were just like "ok how quickly can we make money from this thing"
DALL-E 2 is a way more interesting example of similar thing imo.
https://youtu.be/nVhmFski3vg
Made by OpenAI who are researchers who mainly wanna build cool shit.

Midjourney is alright, terrible customization options and very archaic text only prompt parameter settings. Dall-E 2 unless I'm mistaken also has weird limitations as far as resolution go, unless you set it up yourself.

Nightcafe seems like the most cashgrabby for-profit system and yet I almost never have to pay any money because you earn more credits if you artwork is liked by others. Very flexible prompt system and probably one of the best systems currently available.