by looking pieces made by other people to learn

Humans do it it's inspiration.
Computers do it it's theft.

Humans also look at other peoples art to learn, they might also really like someone else’s style and want to produce works in that style themselves, does this make them AI? Humans have been copying and remixing off of each other since the beginning of time.

The fact that a lot of movie pitches are boiled down to “thing A, meets thing B” and the person listening is able to autocomplete that “prompt” well enough to decide to invest in the idea or not, is the clearest evidence of that, I personally don’t think that just because humans are slower and we aren’t able to reproduce things perfectly even though that’s what we are trying to do sometimes, means that we somehow have a monopoly on this thing called creativity or originality.

You could maybe argue that it comes down to intentionality, and that because the AI isn’t “conscious” yet, it isn’t making the decision to create the artwork on its own or making the decision to accept the art commission via the prompt on its own. Then it can’t have truely created the art the same way photoshop didn’t create the art.

But I’ve always found the argument of “it’s not actually making anything because it had to look at all these other works by these other people first” a little disingenuous because it ignores the way humans learn and experience things since the day we are born.

Then everything that is created by a real person is not OC either. I don't know why people think that we're somehow special.

You could make that argument about humans who look at other stories of art before creating one of their own, influenced by the others then.

Let's say I give an AI a prompt to create a picture of a cute puppy of about six weeks old, but as large as a building, and instead of paws, each leg ended in a living rubber ducky the size of a car, and the puppy is squatting to poop, but instead of poop coming out, it's the great men and women of science like Mendel, Pasteur, Nobel, Currie, Einstein, and others, all landing in a pile. Oh, and if like the picture to be in the style of Renoir. I think we could agree that the resulting picture wouldn't be a copy of any existing one. I think I'd feel justified in calling it original content. I've seen a lot of hand painted works that were more derivative of other work, but that people all agree is OC.