I get that "first to publish" matters to a lot of people, but, say 5 unrelated people are writing unique screenplays about a series of events that seems important to them or culture or whatever; if they all come up with very similar plots and locations and scenes, it just means that the idea is more obvious than non-obvious.
Please, argue. I haven't fully reconciled a lot of this to myself, but off the cuff this'll do.
The logic being - if an AI without taint produces some other work, that work drew on the same information the model did, and came to the same "conclusion" - which means with a time machine, you could wipe the LLM, go back to the period of the original work, train the LLM, and produce the work contemporaneous to the original. Hope that made sense.
This logic would immediately get shot down by an "Objection, speculation" in an actual litigation. Besides, the technicalities of how the work was produced don't really play a role in assessing infringement. PK Dick wrote "The man in the high castle" by extensively using the I Ching, but if I use it and recreate the novel by complete accident I would still be infringing.
By the way, I highly suggest Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" as a great story on the topic of authorship :)
You can't claim it's a clean room without actually doing the legwork of making a clean room. Not including the copyrighted work verbatim isn't enough, you would need to show that the AI hadn't seen anything derived from that copyrighted work, or that it had seen only non-copyrightable pieces.
