“When you go down that path of arguing, ‘It’s some data derived from the image in a certain way,’ well, that’s just a copy,” says Butterick. “It’s just a fancy way of figuring out how to store the data and regenerate it later.” Renowned science journalist and sci-fi writer Ted Chiang recently made much the same point in the New Yorker magazine: Chatbots and other AI generators, as he put it, are best understood as “a blurry JPEG of the web.”