> This all reminds me of “fixing” mis-architected software by adding extra conditional code for every special case that is discovered to work incorrectly...

Isn't that what AI training is in general? It has worked pretty well so far.

I dont think img-gen AI is ever going to "understand physics", but that isn't the task at hand. I don't think it is neccesary to understand physics to make good fake pictures. For that matter, i dont think understanding physics would even be a good approach to the fake picture problem.