[philwelch]

> There is little mystery to how large language models function and it's clear that their output is parroting back portions of their training data

If this were true, then you would be able to identify the specific work being "parroted" and you'd have a case for copyright infringement regardless of whether it was produced by an LLM at all. This isn't how LLMs work though. For instance, if an LLM's training data includes the complete works of a given author and then you prompt the LLM to write a story in the style of that author, it will actually write an original story instead of reproducing one of the stories in its training corpus. It won't be particularly good but it will be an original work.

It also isn't obvious whether or not, or to what degree, LLM training works differently from human learning. You yourself acknowledged that there are "many open questions" about how human learning works, so how can you be so confident that it's fundamentally different? It doesn't matter anyway because you can still apply the exact same standards to LLM output to judge whether it infringes copyright that you would to something that was produced by a human being.