Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

"Lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator."

Not eligible for copyright protection does not mean it can be copyrighted "under the human creator's name". It means there is no creative work at all. No copyright.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

As you said, it's lossy. Try it with any other distinctive but non-famous passage, and you won't get a correct prediction for the immediately following clause, much less for multiple sentences or paragraphs.

That's the case even when an LLM correctly identifies which book the prompted text is from. It still won't accurately continue on from some arbitrary passage. By the time you ask it to reproduce hundreds of words, you're into brand new book territory. Even when it's slop content, it's distinct slop.

The exceptions are cases where a significant number of humans would also know a particular quote from memory. Then, chances are, a frontier LLM will too.

You know how else you can reproduce a quote? Search for it on google, and search the resulting top hits; if it's a significant quote, multiple people have probably quoted it -- legally. You can also search a pirate library for the actual book, and search the book for the quote; while illegal, it's very simple to do, so unless you propose to make the free and open internet illegal, I'd suggest that banning LLMs for being "derivative work" creation engines is not so different from destroying the internet.

> I predict, no pun intended, that a time is coming when the idea that it's not a derived work will be challenged in mainstream law.

If judges have any sense whatsoever, LLM generations (without specific prompt crafting to mimic existing works) will be judged to not be derived works and therefore not be violating copyright, in the same sense that you can live and breathe Taylor Swift's music, create new music in the same style, and still not be violating copyright.

The Stability AI case, and how Judge Orrick deals with it, will be interesting and uninteresting at the same time. It deals primarily with the fact that after specific prompting, an image-generation AI can generate something fairly close to existing copyrighted images. That doesn't say anything more about whether LLMs are inherently producers of [only or primarily] derivative works, just as the fact that a human can violate copyright doesn't say anything about whether humans primarily or exclusively output derivative works.

More likely, perhaps, is that everything will be so infused with LLM output that copyright ceases to be relevant, or forces copyright law to be rewritten from the ground up.

Copyright requirements, even prior to LLMs, weren't well-specified. There's no objective threshold for how close something has to be to a previous work before the new one violates copyright. It's whatever a judge thinks, refering to the 4-factor test but ultimately making subjective judgements about each of those prongs. It's all a house of cards, and LLMs may just be what topples it.

Sure, but that's not what LLM's generally do, and it's certainly not what they're intended to do.

The LLM companies, and many other people, argue that training falls under fair use. One element of fair use is whether the purpose/character is sufficiently transformative, and transforming texts into weights without even a remote 1-1 correspondence is the transformation.

And this is why LLM companies ensure that partial reproduction doesn't happen during LLM usage, using a kind of copyrighted-text filter as a last check in case anything would unintentionally get through. (And it doesn't even tend to occur in the first place, except when the LLM is trained on a bunch of copies of the same text.)

Our "foreparents" weren't competing with corporations with unlimited access to generative AI trained on their work. The times, they're-a-changin'.

You're rehashing the argument made in one of the articles which this piece criticizes and directly addresses, while ignoring the entirety of what was written before the conclusion that you quoted.

If anyone finds themselves agreeing with the comment I'm responding to, please, do yourself a favor and read the linked article.

I would do no justice to it by reiterating its points here.