> For me personally, what is more interesting is that we might not even be able to copyright these creations at all. A court still might rule that all AI-generated code is in the public domain, because there was not enough human input in it. That’s quite possible, though probably not very likely. As I understand it, the US Supreme Court has just this week ruled exactly this. LLM output cannot be copyrighted, so the o…
Code is one thing, but what about writing? There is no 100% foolproof way to identify content written by LLMs, and human writing routinely gets incorrectly flagged as such. If I write a book, and a checker says that it's written by LLM, is it automatically in the public domain?
My understanding is that only human creativity can be copyrighted. So if you sketched out the plot and got the LLM to write all the words, then only the plot is copyrightable. So someone else can copy all the words, as long as they don't copy your plot.
However, as you point out, someone has to determine which bits the LLM created and which bits you created. If you wrote the whole book, and a tool incorrectly flags your writing as LLM writing, and then someone copies chunks of your book because they believed the tool and assumed they could (and assuming you filed a DMCA claim and they denied it using the tool's output as proof) then there's going to have to be a court case.
I suspect there's going to be a few court cases about this.