>I don't get this analogy at all. Instead of a human information flows through a neural network which alters the information.

These days most photos are also stored using lossy compression which alters the information.

You can think of this as a form of highly lossy compression of an image of this forest in time and space.

Most lossy compression is 'subtractive' in that detail is subtracted from the image in order to compress it, so the kind of alterations are limited. However there have been previous non-subtractive forms of compression (eg, fractal compression) that have been criticised on the basis of making up details, which is certainly something that a neural network will do. However if the network is only trained on this forest data, rather than being also trained on other data and then fine tuned, then in some sense it does only represent this forest rather than giving an 'informed impression' like a human artist would.

>These days most photos are also stored using lossy compression which alters the information.

I noticed this in some photos I see online starting maybe 5-10 years ago.

I'd click through to a high res version of the photo, and instead of sensor noise or jpeg artefacts, I'd see these bizarre snakelike formations, as though the thing had been put through style transfer.