If you concatenate images into a stream container (say as tar) and then compress the stream, the compression coding will (generally) cross over the individual images. True, that's generally not lossy compression.
But concatenating images is also how you create video. Lossy video compression does typically cross over frames. So I don't actually see a difference. If you want to think about mkv or mp4 instead of zip it's still the same concept.
There's nothing stopping you from putting every available image into a video and figuring out how to compress it lossily.
Maybe there's some bounds for how much information was lost? Obviously piping everything into /dev/null destroys the input. And piping /dev/random from a true random source creates information. So somewhere between that and lossless compression there's the nebulous "plagarism" threshold. And then there's another threshold that is copyright infringement that's considered "fair use".
But the general structure of the "AI" this is about are fundamentally storage and retrieval.
