zlacker

You seem to be confused as to nomenclature, transformative works are still derivative works. Being sufficiently transformative can allow for a fair use exception, the distinction is important because you can’t tell if something is sufficiently transformative without a court case.

Also, a jpg seemingly fits your definition as “no creativity was used in making them, etc” but clearly they embody the original works creativity. Similarly, a model can’t be trained on random data it needs to extract information from it’s training data to be useful.

The specific choice of algorithm used to extract information doesn’t change if something is derivative.