Your first post I was replying to was you saying the AI had "internalized the rules" of "cloth dynamics", "fluids", etc. like some kind of human artist.
It's not like a human artists but they do internalize them.
that creates mathematical associations.
And those mathematical associations represent?
They are not the pixels by themselves.
Why do you think it can generate images that we get in terms of the lighting, materials and shadows?
If it were the pixels or shapes by themselves you would expect the light and shadow to be all over the place, yet what we get is surprisingly consistent.
After all every image in the training data has its own completely different light setup that you cannot copy part of the image and paste it in another image.
It's precisely because it can abstract and generalize the lighting of a scene.
The fact that you can change the lighting with a Prompt should tell you as much.
If it does it for lighting it does it for all kinds of things.
People are to obsessed about how the algorithm works when we are long past that in terms of what is important, it is not the Algorithm it is the Data, the GPT models should tell you as much.
There is no fundamental difference in the algorithm between GPT 3, GPT 4 and GPT5, what is different is the sheer amount of Training Data and Computation.