He's making a point about responsibility/liability.
If you only get copyright for the prompt you make, but not the output, then it's like being responsible only for the prompt, but not the output.
Ie he's only responsible for pushing the boulder up the hill. The fact that it rolled down from the hill and crushed someone's house "isn't his fault" (he doesn't get copyright on it).
>The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output.
If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it?
> If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it?
If you do not understand this make sure that you always operate within a framework of people who do because this soft of misunderstanding can cause you a world of grief.
Because you are the person shipping it, and as such regular liability applies. If I'm not the author of a book, and make a lot of copies and distribute those I'm liable for the content of that book, regardless of whether or not I hold the copyright to it. Conversely, if the original author sues because they feel their work infringes then that too is a liability that stems from the distribution.
And 'distribution' is a pretty wide term, not unlike 'interstate commerce', lots of things that you might not consider to be distribution can be classified as such in court.
Different laws do not come in packages, they apply individually, and sometimes they apply collectively but it isn't a menu where you can pick the combination that you think makes the most sense.
Oh, I do understand it - laws are contradictory and can do whatever people shout out the most that they should do (but they don't always work that way). I just think that it is extremely bad when laws work this way.
Technically when you select "copy image" instead of "copy image url" and paste that to a friend you're often committing copyright infringement. Do I think this is reasonable? Absolutely not. The same goes for this - the author should hold liability, so make the person who ends up causing the work to exist the damn author.
But nooo, we can't have that. Instead we need to have these convoluted exceptions that don't at all work how the real world works, so that lawyers can have even more work.
Besides, if we go by "the law" then we already have a court case where training an AI model is protected by fair use. But obviously that isn't satisfying enough for people, so they keep talking about how it's stealing (refer to my first sentence).
Also, this situation is going to get funny when some country decides that AI generated content does get copyright protection.
In some places simply not keeping the public street in front of property ice-free can incur liability, even when you are not actually there when it snows. There are so many such examples I'm kind of surprised to see this kind of confused argument made here.
But that's not at all a comparable situation though, because it is your party. It doesn't matter where it is, we assign "ownership" of the party to you. Even the language we use explicitly states that. In the case of copyright, we explicitly states (by the copyright office), that you are not the author of an AI generated work.
Imagine you cut the sentence "I'm going to kill you, this is an imminent threat." out of a book and hand it to someone.
It would be silly to consider you the author of that sentence in a copyright sense.
It would be equally silly to say you have no liability from that sentence.
Looking back at the boulder example, that LLM output has no consequences to be liable for if you throw it immediately into the trash bin. It's when you take boulder.txt and use it to do things that you have liability despite not having copyright.
That is not how responsibility works anywhere. If you are stealing a gun and murder someone with that gun, you are still responsible, even if it is not your gun.