There is a difference between a knock off and a derivative work. Legally in the US the derivative has to be sufficiently different. Are these sufficiently different from the original? I don't know. Are the photos of the man sitting next to his carvings art, or an advertisement of his art, or both? If I knelt down next to a carved wooden dog and had a photo taken would I be stealing this fellows art? The current AI art thing is basically an averaging of elements from various pictures. The "machine" is fed a bunch of pictures, many of which are tagged with "dog". After sufficient "dog" inputs, a pattern is established that coincides with "dog", the same for "man", "wood", "cloud"… etc. These people are definitely ripping-off the *idea* of "look at this dog I carved" but, ideas in and of themselves can't be copyrighted otherwise I would copyright any depiction of the human form and be the richest person ever.