[dijksterhuis]

i weirdly agree with you, but also want to point out that “influenced by the training data” is doing some very heavy lifting there.

exactly how the new work is created is important when it comes to derivative works.

does it use a copy of the original work to create it, or a vague idea/memory of the original work’s composition?

when i make music it’s usually vague memories. i’d argue that LLMs have an encoded representation of the original work in their weights (along with all the other stuff).

but that’s the legal grey area bit. is the “mush” of model weights an encoded representation of works, or vague memories?

[philwelch]

I don’t really think it matters because you can just compare the output to the input and apply the same standard, treating the process between the two as a black box.

[dijksterhuis]

did you just call me a black box? :/

not sure how i feel about being reduced down to that as a human being.

[philwelch]

As far as I’m concerned you are a black box. Just as I’m a black box from your perspective. In principle I could come over and vivisect your brain if you’d like, but I doubt you’d be interested, and I wouldn’t really want to incur the legal liability even if you were.

Besides, “black box” just means that your internal mental life and cognitive mechanism is opaque to me. It’s not like I’m calling you a p-zombie.