[oreally]

These are my opinions ofc.

> Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word?

If you meant it literally.. I'd think that such a version would be a sort of parody. It'd be up to lawyers doing their cross-examinations to prove the work was intended for such a purpose though..

> Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.

Probably a lawyer would answer this better than me, but the 'content' is the same and would violate copyright. There's also other factors, like if it was translated/distributed for free.

Besides that I regard that LLMs to hold mathematical observations in contrast to a translated work. So long as the user ensures the output isn't close to what's already available imo it fits the transformative criteria.

[tovej]

You cannot claim that a formulaic thesaurusing of a text is parody, not unless the process is related to the message of the original text itself. Even then, that's a dubious claim. Especially if it was done automatically.

I can just as well say that a translated work contains "linguistic observations". In fact a translator has to do a lot of transformative work in order to translate a text.

An LLM just takes a set of texts, looks at n-gram distributions, and generates similar text. It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying. There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.

[oreally]

> You cannot claim that a formulaic thesaurusing of a text is parody, not unless the process is related to the message of the original text itself. Even then, that's a dubious claim. Especially if it was done automatically.

Oh even if it's not a parody it would look transformed enough that a first-time reader would be getting a completely different interpretation of the story* compared to the original source. And that's all that matters.

> There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.

Wrong. Weights, which these models comprise of, are literally numbers to an extensive mathematical equation.

> It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying.

And no one knows/there is no consensus on what a 'fuzzy way of copying' is. It is either copying or it is not. You could say that training an LLM is abstracting and integrating various text into it's weights, hereby transforming the source material and again transforming it a second time via integrating it into its weights.

[protocolture]

>It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying.

Even if it involved copying that isnt immediately an issue. Its the distribution of a copy thats an issue. And if you look at the data side by side, you can see that while copying might be part of the process of creating an LLM, the LLM is not a copy of its source material.