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by senaevren 46 days ago
The sound recording analogy breaks down at the point where the recorder makes no creative decisions. Pressing record captures what is already there. Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. The closer analogy is hiring a session musician and telling them the key and tempo. You own the recording under work-for-hire if they signed the right contract, but the creative expression in the performance is theirs unless explicitly assigned. The button you push to start the model is not the same button as the one on the recorder.
2 comments
hackingonempty 46 days ago
> Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation.

LLMs don't make decisions. Their output is completely determined by an algorithm using the human prompt, fixed weights, and a random seed. No different than the many effects humans use in image or audio editors. Nobody ever questioned whether art made using only those effects on a blank canvas was subject to copyright.

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CamperBob2 46 days ago
Fourier theory says that any sound, however complex, can be synthesized by summing sines and cosines. That's what an LLM does, if you twist the metaphor enough. It synthesizes complex outputs from simpler basis functions that are, or should be, uncopyrightable.

The fact that it inferred those basis functions from studying copyrighted works doesn't seem relevant. Nor does the fact that the "Fourier sums" sometimes coincide with larger fragments of works that are copyrighted. How weird would it be if that didn't happen?

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array_key_first 46 days ago
Of course it's relevant. How copyright infringement happens doesn't actually matter, all that matters is that the infringement happened.

If I painstakingly recreate A New Hope frame by frame, pixel by pixel, that's infringement. Even if I technically used 0 content from the original.

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CamperBob2 46 days ago
Nobody is doing that, though. You might get a watermarked screenshot or stock photo now and then, or a couple of mostly-verbatim paragraphs from Harry Potter.

In any case, if the copyright mafia insists on butting heads with AI, they'll find that the fight doesn't quite play out the way it has in the past.

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