- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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.
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.
And yet, we know that the work is mechanically derivative.
So is literally every human work in the last 1000 years in every context.
Nothing is “original”. It’s all derivative. Feeding copyrighted work into an algorithm does not in any way violate any copyright law, and anyone telling you otherwise is a liar and a piece of shit. There is no valid interpretation anywhere close.
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.
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.
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…