There was an interesting paper published just recently titled Generative Models: What do they know? Do they know things? Let's find out! (a lot of fun names and titles in the AI field these days :) ) That does a lot of work in actually analyzing what an AI image generator "knows" about what they're depicting. They seem to have an awareness of three dimensional space, of light and shadow and reflectivity, lots of things you wouldn't necessarily expect from something trained just on 2-D images tagged with a few short descriptive sentences. This article from a few months ago also delved into this, it showed that when you ask a generative AI to create a picture of a physical object the first thing the AI does is come up with the three-dimensional shape of the scene before it starts figuring out what it looks like. Quite interesting stuff.