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>My personal opinion is that the source data does not exist inside the model, so the model does not in and off itself comprise of a copyright violation.

The "source data" does not exist in a ZIP file either. Neural networks are just a form of data compression like ZIP, though more opaque and lossy, but still, a highly compressed abstract version of the training corpus is encoded in the weights.

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A zip file is not a good analogy to a language model as the zip can reproduce the original exactly with 100% recall, language models have very few episodes of verbatim reproduction and coverage is spotty. A zip file can only reproduce the original, but a language model can be asked to write custom, situated code. The language model still works if you block all the training data from appearing in its output.

Potential output has nothing to do with the question whether the training data is "memorized" in the weights or not. To me, the answer to the latter question is "obviously yes".

Like I said, it's a lossy form of compression.

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