[AnthonyMouse]

> So they're saying that the LLM cannot be the author, because LLMs cannot claim copyright.

They're saying that the LLM can't be the author.

Now suppose you supply the LLM with a prompt that contains human creativity, it performs a deterministic mathematical transformation on the prompt to produce a derivative text, and you want to copyright that, claiming yourself as the author. What happens then?

If you think the answer is that you can't, how do you distinguish that from what happens when someone writes source code and has a compiler turn it into a binary computer program? Or do you think that e.g. Windows binaries can't be copyrighted because they were compiled by a machine?

[ranger_danger]

> Now suppose you supply the LLM with a prompt

My understanding was that they did in fact do just that, but the court somehow misunderstood what they were doing, and assumed that the LLM was working completely autonomously without any human input at all, which isn't really possible IMO. Someone told it what to do.

They also argued that you couldn't copyright an output that you can't explain how it came to be, i.e. if they had been able to articulate how an LLM works, the outcome might have been quite different, which I found surprising.

If art in general (human-made or otherwise) is always derived from existing influences... should we really be forced to explain how or why we created a piece of art in order to defend it?

The usual bar for copyright infringement of a derivative work is, from what I have seen, "how much did you copy from the original, and how obvious is it", which is of course a subjective determination that would be made by each individual judge or jury of a case.

[marcus_holmes]

> What happens then?

The part that the human created, the prompt, can be copyrighted.

The part that the LLM created, cannot be.

Copyright in code works exactly the same way: the source code is copyrighted. The binary code is only copyrighted to the extent that it is derived from the source code. This is well-established.

[ranger_danger]

Maybe I am just misunderstanding something, but I feel like you might be contradicting yourself here... why can LLM output not be copyrighted, but compiler output can be?

[marcus_holmes]

No, that's the point - the compiler output is only copyrighted to the extent that it is derived from the source code. The compiler itself cannot create anything copyrightable, but because there is a deterministic link between the source code and the binary code, and the source code was the product of a human, the binary code is covered by the source code copyright.

It's like a photocopier. If you photocopy a page from a book, that page is still covered by the copyright of the book author, even if the page is 2x larger or otherwise transformed by the machine.