You could argue that the people who have that specific bit of code would have a decent right to sue, because they have real definitive proof that their works are in that model in some form.
But unless you have managed to make such an output for (insert work here), You have no real claim to copyright on that model.
Which is why I made that Photoshop analogy. You can use it and get it to output someone's copyrighted work. The fact that you can do that doesn't make photoshop itself a problem. The act of making it spit out that copyrighted work, then distributing it, is the problem.
The liability for that is going to have to be figured out in the court system.
> A person with a camera and/or a copy of the original code, if anything.
No, the model doesn't have a copy of the original code when it's running. It only has what it was trained on, as if you read a bunch of stuff on GitHub and later on use what you saw in there while you were writing your own stuff.
And people totally do this as well, they will see things and learn from them and accidentally or unintentionally reproduce them when they are working later.
Which is another reason I think you should treat the output of these models as if someone has actually done it themselves. If you can prove there was violation there, there was violation there. Otherwise, you can't claim the model just like you can't claim the person who learned from your stuff.
> The fact that it compresses very well
It doesn't. The data of these things are trained on is absolutely massive and the final files are not nearly so large. The compression ratio would be absolutely bonkers if that was what was going on here.
What you're seeing is the effects of overfitting on specific examples, which doesn't represent the whole at all. This is finding an exception to the rule and taking it out of context.
To say that the model itself is a derivative work is absurd. You've got a picture and you're going to claim that this AI model that was trained on 7 billion pictures or something like that is derivative of your work?
> This is no different that compressing my program
It is very very different than compressing your program. A compressed file is a compressed file, builds to be compressed and then decompressed to get the original file back.
Again, except for the example where you own a work that is being reproduced by one of these models, proven, this is more like claiming a hash of your file in a folder with 100,000 other files is a derivative work of your file.