[fluidcruft]

Phrases like "transformative way" are meaningless woospeak to me. Everything is a transformation. Sulpose I run a linear convolution on ten images and average them. Is the result "new"? Does it not contain the original images? Subspaces and mappings don't create anything "new" any more than SVD does. This is just playing digital Ship of Thesius.

[tomrod]

> Phrases like "transformative way" are meaningless woospeak to me

Fortunately we live in a society that supports specialization where something that is woospeak to a smart person can still be a very well understood topic. AI transformations are methodologically well documented, even if transparency of neural network node activations is yet to be fully formalized.

[fluidcruft]

In that case, you'll surely be able to provide a citation that clearly distinguishes the differences between the ways of transformations performed by "AI" and the ways of transformations performed by compression.

[tomrod]

Sure. AI (more specifically, ML) is curve fitting, and more generally, objective function optimization. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_fitting

A projection is not compression, necessarily. And you'll find AI is a very poor compressor when used for such a purpose in all but the most trivial setups (e.g SVD matching input data rank, only reversible functions in neural network activation, etc.).

[KHRZ]

Congratulations, you just discovered that copyright is a weak and ill-defined concept.

[fluidcruft]

I think that unless you can clearly show that an "AI" is not a form of compression, the question of copyright is orthogonal. The copyrights that apply to a zip file may be ill-defined concepts to you, but it's not really important to the core question which is: how are model weights different from a zip file? If you put unambiguously copyrighted content into a zip file, most people would agree that the copyright applies to the zip file. So by analogy if you put copyrighted content into model weights, the copyright applies to the model weights. Issues such as what constitutes fair use comes up, but fair use is permissible copyright infringement, not absence of copyright. And that's where the question of how lossy a compression algorithm has to be to be considered "fair use". In all likelihood it's the specifics of the use itself (rather than technology or method details used) that matters.