Avram Piltch is the editor in chief of Tom’s Hardware, and he’s written a thoroughly researched article breaking down the promises and failures of LLM AIs.

  • lily33@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    From Wikipedia, “a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work”.

    You can probably can the output of an LLM ‘derived’, in the same way that if I counted the number of 'Q’s in Harry Potter the result derived from Rowling’s work.

    But it’s not ‘derivative’.

    Technically it’s possible for an LLM to output a derivative work if you prompt it to do so. But most of its outputs aren’t.

    • RickRussell_CA@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work

      What was fed into the algorithm? A human decided which major copyrighted elements of previously created original work would seed the algorithm. That’s how we know it’s derivative.

      If I take somebody’s copyrighted artwork, and apply Photoshop filters that change the color of every single pixel, have I made an expressive creation that does not include copyrightable elements of a previously created original work? The courts have said “no”, and I think the burden is on AI proponents to show how they fed copyrighted work into an mechanical algorithm, and produced a new expressive creation free of copyrightable elements.

      • lily33@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I think the test for “free of copyrightable elements” is pretty simple - can you look at the new creation and recognize any copyrightable elements in it? The process by which it was created doesn’t matter. Maybe I made this post entirely by copy-pasting phrases from other people, who knows (well, I didn’t, only because it would be too much work), but it does not infringe either way…