[Gormo]

> If you put a GPL C program through Emscripten to run in a browser the output doesn't include the original C code but it's surely a derivative work.

Because it does include content from the original work -- this is just a translation, and isn't comparable to how LLMs work.

> To me the answer is simply that humans are special.

I don't disagree, but I also view LLMs as tools that extend human capacities and not autonomous entities unto themselves. LLMs are still just software, and can't really be regarded as anything other than instruments that humans use to broaden their capacity to see, appreciate, understand, and draw on that experience in what they create.

> That may seem remarkably unfair to the machines, or like a cop-out.

No, it's unfair to the humans. The machines are just tools that they use. The "double standard" is really a set of inconsistent standards applied to the same underlying moral agents.

> After all, if you want to treat a machine exactly like a human who learns from prior art to create new art, then the ownership of the new art would also belong to the machine. Not to the person who prompts it.

No, it always belongs to the person who prompts it. The machine is not a conscious entity, bears no intentions, and has no capacity to act on its own initiative. The machine is always just a tool that extends human capacity, as all machines always have.

For a good comparison here, we've never not credited a photographer as the author of a photograph. But the photographer is in a sense merely prompting the camera by framing the shot, selecting the exposure, adjusting the lighting, etc. -- the hard work in actually creating the photograph is being done by the camera itself, with the photographer playing no role in directly constructing the final image, and with the many of the qualities of the final image being determined by pre-existing features of the camera's functional design and components that the photographer also played no role in defining, apart from choosing which camera to use.

LLMs are like cameras in this way. And the fact that they rely on external data for model training no more disclaims the user as the author of the resulting work than looking things up in a dictionary or encyclopedia does the same for the author of an essay.

[rspeele]

The camera analogy is a good one but I have never had a camera that had every great picture somebody else had taken, plus every work of art, baked into it. They only captured what they were aimed at directly by the user. Well, maybe next time I upgrade my phone that will not be the case since they now have built in AI "enhancement" of photos.

I agree with the framing of the AI as a tool not an autonomous entity. The thing is, to me, it is exactly that framing that makes it so the use of that tool means "copying" more than it means "learning and taking inspiration and creating new art", because who is doing the learning and being inspired? The person who types "make me a 3d arena FPS" certainly didn't do any learning from the Quake source code. The AI itself, being just a program, can't take credit.

I think of a trained AI like a lossy, highly compressed copy of its training data set. AI companies charge access to decompress targeted pieces of that copy and the lossiness makes that decompression interesting and "new". But normally I can't charge for access to other people's stuff even if the access is highly lossy, like a camcorder bootleg.

[Gormo]

> The camera analogy is a good one but I have never had a camera that had every great picture somebody else had taken, plus every work of art, baked into it.

I've never had an LLM that had any of that baked into it either. LLMs just have token correlations trained on those works. Trying to get an LLM to output the data it was trained on verbatim is something I'd expect to be heading into monkeys-on-typewriters territory. "Write something in the style of Shakespeare" and "give me the original text of Hamlet" are two very different things.

> I agree with the framing of the AI as a tool not an autonomous entity. The thing is, to me, it is exactly that framing that makes it so the use of that tool means "copying" more than it means "learning and taking inspiration and creating new art", because who is doing the learning and being inspired?

It's not learning or taking inspiration, though. It's just making statistical inferences based on token correlations. Whether or not that's analogous to how humans learn is something I think is a metaphysical question that is of little practical relevance. The fact remains that LLMs are not human, have no intentions of their own, do not exercise any kind of agency despite how often people employing the misnomer "agentic", and are ultimately glorified statistical models.

The LLM is a tool that extends human capacities in the same way as any other mathematical framework or technological device.

> I think of a trained AI like a lossy, highly compressed copy of its training data set.

I've seen a few people in this thread make that argument, but I just can't agree with it. It's not compression, lossy or lossless, which aims to deterministically encode a representation of the specific input data. The training data is analogous to the sample set used in a regression analysis to generate a polynomial function -- it's not valid to treat the output from any application of that polynomial as a copy of the original sample data.