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0 pointsjagged-chisel20d ago0 comments

This is the correct understanding. Go back to the selfie of the monkey. Is the monkey the creator of the photo? Does he own the copyright? No. The photographer who created the opportunity for the monkey to take the selfie is the holder of the copyright on that image.

Similarly, the operator of the LLM is the holder of the copyright of the LLM’s output.

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magicalist20d ago

> This is the correct understanding. Go back to the selfie of the monkey. Is the monkey the creator of the photo? Does he own the copyright? No. The photographer who created the opportunity for the monkey to take the selfie is the holder of the copyright on that image.

This is incorrect. The monkey is unable to have a copyright on the photograph, but there was no court case suggesting the owner of the camera (Slater) has a copyright on the photo, and the Copyright Office's rules actually say the opposite, that it isn't copyrightable at all (the Wikipedia summary of the situation is good, pointing out the Copyright Office specifically added an example of "a photograph taken by a monkey" to their guidance to make their point clear).

jagged-chiselOP20d ago

I was indeed misremembering part of this.

The professional photographer claimed he engineered the situation that led to the photo and thus he owns the copyright on the images. That specific claim appears to not have been addressed by the court nor by the copyright office. Instead Slater settled by committing to donations from future revenue of the photos.

observationist20d ago

If it were a trained monkey, and the photographer held a button in his hand that triggered the photo taking mechanism, there'd be no question of copyrightability. Similarly, vibe-coding and eliciting output from a software tool which results in software or images or text created under the specification and direction and intent and deliberate action of the user of the tool is clearly able to be copyrighted.

The user is responsible for the output of the software. An image created in photoshop isn't the IP of Adobe, nor is text in Word somehow belonging to Microsoft. The idea that because the software tool is AI its output is magically immune from copyright is silly, and any regulation or legislation or agency that comes to that conclusion is silly and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Until they get over the silliness, just lie. You carefully manually crafted each and every character, each pixel, each raw byte by hand, slaving away with a tiny electrode, flipping each bit in memory, to elicit the result you see. Any resemblance to AI creations is purely coincidental, or deliberate as an ironic statement about current affairs.

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