- the copyright status of the output of LLMs is ambiguous
- this ambiguity represents a legal risk to the users of LLMs
- given that ambiguity, nobody should use LLMs for work that is intended to be copyrighted
It’s not clear to me if any of these are true individually, never mind all together.
Maybe the copyright status is ambiguous but I think the probability that the output of LLMs is owned by anyone other than API caller is very low. You can copyright works, but you can’t copyright the ideas within those works.
Possibly this represents a liability issue but I think the probability of that is vanishingly small. Just because a legal theory exists doesn’t mean it’s going to be enforceable - one of the reasons for the existence of Uber, youtube, etc. if it’s a fait-accompli it’s not a risk.
Finally, it representing a risk of copyright liability is still just a business decision. I would guess that existing software projects are riddled with code snippets of ambiguous or incompatible licenses. All it takes is one person to copy a function that is GPL and label it otherwise and then it’s out in the world, technically running amok. It is probable that under the strictest definitions, every software company is engaging in some low level of copyright infringement. All-in, this means that while it’s a risk, it’s a risk you’re probably already taking and so you might reasonably conclude to ignore.