[AmericanChopper]

> There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works.

Most generated content almost certainly isn’t derivative work by the standards of copyright law. It’s plainly obvious to anybody who’s read Frank Herbert’s books that he derived a lot of ideas from Isaac Asimov, but it’s equally obvious that Dune isn’t a derivative work of Foundation.

If I had some commercial interest in generative AI models, I’d be very happy that everybody is debating the copyright implications. Because copyright law is certainly going to favour the models. The biggest regulatory risk to them as far as I can tell is that they clearly don’t have section 230 protections, and I can’t imagine how that isn’t going to come crashing down around them rather soon.

[Retric]

If you run someone over you can’t defend yourself by saying 99.999% of the time you didn’t run someone over. Most output being free of copyright issues isn’t a defense if any output has those issues.

Specific examples of clear copyright infringement mean that output is a derivative work AND by encoding enough information to recreate it the underlying neural network must itself be a derivative work.