[zozbot234]

> automatically rephrased an original text - something like the Encyclopaedia Britannica - to preserve the meaning but not have identical phrasing

Note that it's very hard to do this starting from a single source, because in order to be safe from any copyright concern you'd have to only preserve the bare "idea" and everything else in your text must be independent. But LLM's seem to be able to get around this by looking at many sources that are all talking about the same facts and ideas in very different ways, and then successfully generalizing "out of sample" to a different expression of the same ideas.

[DrScientist]

The concept clustering across multiple sources allows you to rephrase more accurately while retaining meaning - however the point I'm making is if you then point that program at Encyclopaedia Britannica and simply rephrase it then charge for access to the rephrased version - should you be allowed to do that?

[zozbot234]

The underlying problem is that "meaning" in the ordinary sense still includes plenty of copyrightable elements. If you point a typical LLM program at some arbitrary text and tell it to "rephrase" that, you'll generally end up with a very close paraphrase that still leaves intact to a huge extent the "structure, sequence and organization" (in a loose sense) of the original. So it turns out that you're still in breach of copyright. All you're allowed to use when starting from a single copywritten text is the ideas and facts in their very barest sense.

[DrScientist]

So if I made a pop song with was entirely copied from existing songs - but ensured that each fragment was relatively short ( but long enough to be recognisable ), then I'd be ok?

ie the way to avoid copyright is to double down on the copying?

I can see how, for a human, you could argue that there is creativity in splicing those bits together into a good whole - however if that process is automated - is it still creative - or just automated theft?