> The point of copyright is to protect an exclusive right to copy, not the right to produce original works influenced by previous works.
> If an LLM produces original works that are influenced by the training data, that is not a violation of copyright.
This isn’t how LLM’s work though. Samples are just that, literal samples that are copied from one work to another verbatim. LLM’s use training data to construct a predictive model of which tokens follow each other. You probably could get an LLM to use samples deliberately if you wanted to, but this isn’t how they typically work.
Regardless, at that point you’re just evaluating the claim of copyright infringement based on the nature of the work itself, which is exactly what I’m advocating, versus presuming that all LLM output is necessarily copyright infringement if any copyrighted material was used in training.
exactly how the new work is created is important when it comes to derivative works.
does it use a copy of the original work to create it, or a vague idea/memory of the original work’s composition?
when i make music it’s usually vague memories. i’d argue that LLMs have an encoded representation of the original work in their weights (along with all the other stuff).
but that’s the legal grey area bit. is the “mush” of model weights an encoded representation of works, or vague memories?
not sure how i feel about being reduced down to that as a human being.
Besides, “black box” just means that your internal mental life and cognitive mechanism is opaque to me. It’s not like I’m calling you a p-zombie.