[rectang]

This has an easy answer — it’s just not the one that people who desperately want to use LLMs for copyright washing want to hear.

The test for what constitutes a derivative work has not changed; it’s the same whether a single human author produced something, or a team of humans, or an LLM. It will be up to a court to decide whether a work is similar enough to be considered derivative.

If an LLM spits out a verbatim copy, that’s obviously infringement. But if the LLM spits out something similar? Well if the LLM spits out something like George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord [1], a court may well decide that it’s derivative of He’s So Fine. Especially if the LLM “subconsciously” “knew” about He’s So Fine because it was part of the training corpus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infrin...