It may not have been conscious, proactive “training”, but before you ever picked up your camera you’d been exposed (pardon the pun) to thousands (at least) of photos others had taken. That unconscious exposure still counts, even if you don’t think of it as training.

No I hadn’t. I don’t think you understood how infrequently you would come across photos of things like rare wildlife and remote wilderness locations in the 80s.

You’re missing the forest for the trees here. The point is that a photographer doesn’t learn how to produce pictures of a screwdriver by looking at pictures of a screwdriver. A photographer learns how to take pictures generally and then can instantly be capable of producing pictures of far more objects than he/she has ever observed.

Generative AI is not capable of that because it’s not operating a camera in reality.