[Lerc]

If you take that approach to fair use, don't you open the door to the same argument for copyright itself?

How do you distinguish between a tool and the director of a tool? I doubt people would say that a person is immune to copyright or fair use rules because it was the pen that wrote the document, not the person.

[int_19h]

I think it's a valid question. Suppose you have two LLMs interacting with each other in a loop, and one randomly prompts the other to reproduce the entire text of Harry Potter, which the other then does. However, the chat log isn't actually stored anywhere, it's just a transient artifact of the interaction - so no human ever sees it nor can see it even in principle. Is it a copyright violation then? If it is, what are the damages?

[Retric]

> don’t you open the door to the same argument for copyright itself?

Yes, it comes down to intentional control of output. Copyright applies when someone uses a pen to make a drawing because of the degree of control.

On the flip side there are copyright free photos where an animal picked up a camera etc, the same applies to a great deal of automatically generated data. The output of an LLM is likely in the public domain unless it’s a derivative work of something in the training set.