> The mechanisms are different but the underlying idea is the same

no.

they are the same as asking a person to say a number between 1 and 6, then asking the same question to a dice and concluding that men and dice work the same.

> identify important features and replicate those features in new context

untrue

if you think that that's what people do, obviously you can conclude that AI and humans are similar.

But people don't identify features, people first of all learn how to replicate - mechanically - the strokes, using the same tools as the original artists until they are able to do it, most of the time people fail and reiterate the process until they find something they are actually very good at and only after that the good ones develop their own style.

based either on some artistic style or some artistic meaning.

But the first difference we learn here is that humans can fail to replicate something and still become renown artists.

An AI cannot do that.

Not on its own.

For example, many probably already know, but Michelangelo was a sculptor.

He was proficient as a painter too, but painting wasn't his strongest skill.

So artists, first of all, are creators, not mere replicators, in many different forms, they are not good at everything in the same way, but their knowledge percolates in other fields related to theirs: if you need to make preparatory drawings for a sculpture, you need to be good at drawing and probably painting (lights, shadows, mood, expressions, are all fundamental for a good sculpture)

Secondly, the features artists derive from other art pieces are not the technical ones, those needed to make an exact replica of the original, but those that make it special.

For example, in the case of Michelangelo, the Pietà has some features that an AI would surely miss.

First of all the way he shaped the marble that was unheard of, it doesn't mean much if you don't contextualize the opera and immerse it in the historical period it was created.

An AI could think that Michelangelo and Canova were contemporary, while they were separated by 3 centuries, which make a lot of difference in practice and in spirit.

But more importantly, Michelangelo's Pietà is out of proportion, he could not make the two figures in the correct scale, proving that even a genius like he was could not easily create a faithful reproduction of two adults one in the lap of the other, with the tools of the 16th century.

The Virgin Mary is very, very young, which was at odds with her role as a grieving mother and, the most important of them all, the Christ figure is not suffering, because Michelangelo did not want to depict death.

An AI would assume that those are all features of Michelangelo's way of sculpting, but in reality it's the result of a mix of complexity of the opera, time when it was created, quality and technology of the tools used and the artist intentions, which makes the opera unique and, ultimately, irreproducible.

If you use an AI to reproduce Michelangelo, everybody would notice, because it's literally something a complete noob or someone with a very bad taste would do.

So to not say the difference, you should copy the works of lesser known artists, making it even more unethical.