[TeMPOraL]

> This is exactly the opposite of copyright as described in the What Colour Are Your Bits, essay.

Wait, what? "Colour of your bits" doesn't have anything to do with metaphysics. It's about provenance. The colour doesn't exist in the bits, but it exists in the casual history - the chain of events that led you to have a piece of copyrighted (or criminalized) data on your hard drive. You may argue that it's just a big integer, and it could've been produced by a random number generator. "Colour" encodes the response: "yes, it could have been produced by an RNG, but it wasn't - those particular bits on this particular machine came from some unauthorized download site".

[roywiggins]

You could, I suppose, argue that the causal chains behind an LLM, are simply not the correct causal chains to produce reasoning, but that's a lot more complicated, mainly by the fact that we don't understand exactly what they are, and we don't understand the causal chains that produce human reasoning, so we can't confidently compare them other than on the largest of scales (LLMs are in silica, etc).

That, and it's not obvious why we should make this distinction. A cake that spontaneously assembles itself is still a cake, even if it doesn't have the usual causal history of a cake.

[TeMPOraL]

I don't want to make this distinction. I was just objecting to misusing the "colour of your bits" essay to try and support ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with what the essay is about.

Here, as you say, a cake is a cake, and an intelligence is an intelligence, regardless of how it came to be. We can revisit the relevance of causal history once we reach the point we can assemble organisms from from cells, and/or create cells out of dead matter - at which point the only difference between "born" and "made" will be the Colour of its cells.

[kelseyfrog]

The property of legal ownership is preserved through the process of training and prediction. Models don't bleach ownership (and therefore copyright).

[TeMPOraL]

That is for the courts to be determined. Causal connection is there, but colours from the legal palette evolve by rules of applicable laws.

For example, if I have an LLM that had your copyrighted works in its training data, then any of its output is causally deriving from those copyrighted works of yours - it comes out painted in colour of "causally derived from ${kelseyfrog's works present in the training set}" - but whether or not it also carries the colour of "derivative of ${kelseyfrog's works...} in copyright law sense", depends on... the copyright law, and may change over time based on how that set of laws evolve.