I don’t think it should be compared to a collage, because that’s not what the model is doing. It’s taking words, and predicting what humans expect to see when given these words describing the image. This is an attempt at generalization, and should start to look similar between models as they improve in quality.

If you take a course on Duolingo, and you learn a language using their copyrighted images, you didn’t steal Duolingo’s content when you applied the knowledge you learned to make creative works for someone in that new language. Though, I think there is some sentiment from people misunderstanding this process and believing that the original owner of the copyrighted content should be entitled to partial ownership too.