Culinary skills at the high-end are typically passed on directly from chefs to their apprentices, intending to be used, built on, and passed down again. It doesn’t really work the way being described, which is fine, because there’s no way to shape this scenario into a comparable one.

Any attempt to compare the A.I. stuff to some analogous scenario is deeply flawed if it does not include 1) that A.I. instances are not humans, but computers run by companies, and 2) the incredible scale at which it can operate.

The actual actions taking place are secondary at best, and the situation cannot be judged on that alone. It must be debated in the context of the actions being undertaken by machines, owned by companies, motivated by profit/market share/growth/whatever, with little communication or collaboration with the humans who created the works, and that they can now generate outputs based on those works at a scale, frequency, level of precision several orders of magnitude higher than a human can ever compete with. It cannot be compared to any sort of person-to-person scenario. The enormous scale this operates at, by actors that are not human, is the core of the situation.

Recipes are the least of what goes into a restaurant. It's not a secret. In many restaurants the chef will give you the recipe if you ask nicely. If not, anyone skilled in the art could reproduce it.

Running a restaurant is a trillion other things. Ordering the right amount of ingredients. Hiring, training, and keeping staff. Cleaning the bathrooms. Replacing stolen silverware.

You're not paying for the secret recipe. There isn't one. You're paying for the insane amount of work that goes into putting cooked food on a plate.

Images are much more about the specific process that went into creation. The intellectual part that can be taken is a much higher fraction of the product.