You mean they were not generated from a vast cloud library of images? If every pixel was machine-generated, the amount of GPUs must be incredible.
That is the case with all generative models and no, simple generative models could be run even on your CPU - output resolution and overall image quality would be crap obviously but every pixel would be machine-generated. No neural network works as some kind of matching platform that picks out "similar" images out of some stored library - this is a pretty severe misunderstanding of how NNs operate. In fact, it is hard for the network to even produce identity of its input if there are no global skip connections (i.e. adding the input after the whole network) in the architecture. You could argue that the latent space is a compressed cloud library but in that case human mind can also be interpreted as a compressed library since we are not born with the knowledge we have today, our mind, much like the latent space of the neural network, is formed through the learning process which is constant for humans.
However, it is important not to overrate modern NNs and put them on the same level as a human brain - NNs in their current state are crude simplified mathematical models of our brains. Their latent space is far more limited in real capacity (it's true that some models have trillions of parameters but when you dig further, you will find that these models are extremely
sparse in their representation - i.e. only a small portion of those trillions carries important information) and the current learning methods are extremely inefficient - they need billions upon billions of examples sampled from different distributions/domains in order to learn how to generalize the training information, which leads to the problem of "overfitting" where a dataset without enough data diversity leads to model merely learning how to perform well on the data from the same distribution as its training data. Humans, on the other hand, have a "few shot" learning where only a couple of examples could already create some basic understanding of the task.
Overall, I'd say modern NNs are very convenient and powerful tools that can be used to further increase human productivity rather than real "intelligence".