[ansk]

> a list of numbers can not be copyrighted

Any digital object can be represented as a list of numbers (this is precisely the origin of the term digital). Since there is clearly precedent for copyrighted digital objects (media, software, etc), reducing something to "a list of numbers" is not a useful distinction in regard to copyright law.

[MattPalmer1086]

IANAL but as far as I remember, you can't copyright a list of objective facts, for example a phone book containing a list of phone numbers.

Model weights are clearly not in that category. Happy to be corrected if I misremember.

[outofpaper]

Model weight are akin to markov chains and compressed data. They are direct representations of the data they where created from in the same way that markov chains are created from hidden markov chains and Zipped files are created from files.

Zipping a file does not grant the copyright protection of the zipped output beyond the copyright of the original file.

Moreover the American federal registrar has officially stated that AI generated artifacts are not eligible for copyright https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05....

[startupsfail]

If you take some copyrighted data, a set of books, for example. And count words in these books and then plot a distribution of top 100 word frequencies. The copyright for that new image would belong to you.

[MattPalmer1086]

Copyright in the specific image sure, but not the graph itself. Someone else could do the same thing and make their own graph image.

[outofpaper]

Exactly. Data is not covered by American copyright and artifacts generated by LLM and diffusion tools are not covered by copyright protection unless there was human involvement and humans are transparent about how they participated in the creation of the artifacts.

[startupsfail]

For now there is a lot of human involvement. You pretty much need a team of engineers or an equivalent to get anything besides minor fine tuning done. And there is usually human labor involved at labeling, feedback and evaluation stages.