[rlt]

> If I hire an autistic savant to go to a library and read all the books, then I set up a book selling service where whenever people want to buy a book I have my savant employee type out the book for them, is it then going to pass muster in a copyright case if I tell the judge “It’s okay actually, because the books don’t actually exist in my employee’s brain, merely neuronal encodings of them.” ?

No, and I do think OpenAI returning copyrighted works verbatim is probably copyright infringement even if it’s “laundered” through a LLM.

However if the autistic savant only provided summaries, analyses, etc that is fair use (IANAL), and should be for LLMs too.

That probably means LLMs will need some sort of scrubbing process to ensure exact training data can’t be reproduced, or if that’s not feasible then some type of output filter that looks for training data (although that would be a problem for open source models)