While it may seem that AI generated content is just reworking the existing content, that is not it is trying to do. Maybe for search items, it would work better to present already existing content with slight rework. But AI is able to generate completely new content, even though it relies on the content it was trained on.
In my understanding natural language processing models are more of a mathematical solutions, rather than linguistic. AI is able to imitate how humans would construct sentences, paragraphs, articles and speech based on the human language patterns and guessing best matching words one after another. To do that each word is assigned mathematical values to its relationship with other words or symbols.
Can AI create new thoughts and idea? I do believe so. Since human thoughts are common, it is easy to mistake AI content to something humans say/write or may have said or written. Of course, less sophisticated AI solutions simply rely on reusing already existing content. But more sophisticated technologies, and especially in machine learning the idea is to predict what comes next based on training. That is kind of what humans do too.
I don't think humans have been creating new thoughts and ideas out of thin air. Everybody has to learn words, conversations, concepts, etc one step at a time and connect the dots. Without learning process thought wouldn't be possible. It is effortless for us because brain mostly works on autopilot and does all the heavy lifting.
Even collectively, humans rely on previously acquired collective knowledge and idea to create new ones, and to find solutions to old problems. If there was no chain of this knowledge transmission, we would be relearning everything from zero every time and would go nowhere with new ideas and thoughts.
I prefer Midjourney for AI art. No evil robots there, unless specifically requested.
It can communicate, yes. As soon as it can show me how a dog thinks, then I'll believe it can think like a human, and come up with actual new thoughts. It's hard for me to explain what I mean by that. You don't know how I think and I don't know how you think but we're both certain we think. So which one do we call thought, then reproduce with AI?