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[–] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

An LLM, being a large database derived mechanically from its training data, seems to meet the definition of “derived work” as exists in most copyright legislation.

The output from an LLM, through the inference process, is also mechanically derived from that training data.

Lawmakers might try writing exceptions to please a stock market eagerly baying for hyperscaler growth. Despite that, it seems entirely viable that the copyright, held by humans on the training data fed to the LLM, continue to hold in the output derived from that input.

People saying it's “obvious the output has no copyright”, or people who act as though it's all free from any claim by the humans who wrote the works used as training data, are just showing their ignorance, it seems to me.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (3 children)

    If so, the copyright of the slop would be by the company running the LLM.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    What creative transformation has that company done? It seems to me rather that the LLM is an entirely mechanical process with no creativity.

    No more creative than what my ISP does when it conveys data from one machine to another.

    We don't allow the ISP to claim copyright in the data that it mechanically transforms. I don't see why the company running an LLM would have any stronger claim of copyright in the output.

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