[skydhash]

You can ask someone to produce a pin-up version of Minnie Mouse, but good luck using it in any commercial activities.

Most LLMs are just profiteering from people’s labor without their consent. And there’s nothing new being produced. It’s always a statistical output of previous works.

[gwd]

> You can ask someone to produce a pin-up version of Minnie Mouse, but good luck using it in any commercial activities.

The same would automatically apply to LLM output -- there's no need to change the current laws to cover that case.

The question is this. Suppose I ask a human artist and an LLM to create me a new female mouse cartoon character. And suppose both the artist and the LLM have been exposed to Minnie Mouse. It's not unlikely that the new character created in both cases will have aspects specifically similar to, or specifically opposite to Minnie Mouse.

In the case of the human artist, the new character will not be covered by Disney's copyright, unless there was a lot of copying. Why should the result be different for LLMs?

The logical conclusion of "any output of an LLM that's seen Minnie Mouse must be subject to Disney's copyright" is "any output of any human that's seen Minnie Mouse must be owned by Disney". Which I'm sure Disney would love, but would certainly make the world a worse place for everyone.

[chii]

> a pin-up version of Minnie Mouse

that's not because of copyright, but because of trademark. If you make the minnie mouse sufficiently different that it cannot be mistaken for not being Minnie to the average person, and don't call it minnie mouse (to get rid of trademark), disney will have a much harder time suing you. Of course, they will still try, and steam roll you with just money instead.

[JamesBarney]

> And there’s nothing new being produced. It’s always a statistical output of previous works.

I don't think you can define those terms such that what you say is true of AI but not true of people.

[Natsu]

I think you're misunderstanding that, I don't expect it in either case, I'm saying you have to judge the output not the input. So even if it trained on a ton of copyrighted artwork, if the output isn't a ripoff of something in the training data, I don't think there should be any copyright issues.