[tomrod]

> Phrases like "transformative way" are meaningless woospeak to me

Fortunately we live in a society that supports specialization where something that is woospeak to a smart person can still be a very well understood topic. AI transformations are methodologically well documented, even if transparency of neural network node activations is yet to be fully formalized.

[fluidcruft]

In that case, you'll surely be able to provide a citation that clearly distinguishes the differences between the ways of transformations performed by "AI" and the ways of transformations performed by compression.

[tomrod]

Sure. AI (more specifically, ML) is curve fitting, and more generally, objective function optimization. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_fitting

A projection is not compression, necessarily. And you'll find AI is a very poor compressor when used for such a purpose in all but the most trivial setups (e.g SVD matching input data rank, only reversible functions in neural network activation, etc.).