Thanks for your thoughts, Sean. I can tell you when this article was written in January there absolutely were people that thought this was basically a Photoshop collage of other existing artwork.

It's certainly not a parrot. I really can't think of less accurate analogy. Have tried writing a tranformer-based diffusion model of your own to get a deeper understanding of what it is and isn't doing? It only requires basic calculus and a couple afternoons at the computer.