Another painter would go for contextual and topical inference, specifically trying to understand why some techniques and painting styles garner a specific response. The AI goes for topological inference - there are no other informations beyond the painting data itself. It observes that some artists keep reusing the same colors and proportions and builds over the data by using very complicated parametric analysis. It's still mechanical reproduction, just extremely more complicated than in the past.

And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, mind you - going back to my previous musical comparison, Daft Punk built a career with a lo-fi version of this idea, but they never tried to pretend that Harder Better Faster Stronger isn't anything but an extremely, extremely clever flip of Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby". And they paid both licensing and royalties for it.