[belorn]

The likelihood that no output has ever infringed any copyright will be an interesting argument. People are constantly testing and prompting different AI's to see if they can get them to reproduce known content, and there are a few known examples from copilot where such test has shown large amount of reproduced exact copies of comments and other identifiable segments. Similar things has been done with images, like the getty watermark.

AI developers has also started to add filters and other techniques to remove outputs that are too similar to existing works, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It shows that the tools do output such works (as otherwise they wouldn't need to filter it out), but also show that they are working to minimize it. Courts would have to look at it and decide if such efforts are an admittance of the issue or if the mitigations are enough.

In this specific case, I doubt such discussion will occur at this point since the main point that the judge brought up is that the copyrighted works need to be registered first at the copyright office before it can go any further (except for 12 works which already are registered).