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I'm outside of my expertise here, but I think if the model is able to reproduce copyrighted text then distributing the model should be a copyright violation.

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A random text generator can generate copyrighted material.

the model can produce much more than just the original text.

By your logic, distributing the digits of pi could be construed as copyright infringement otherwise.

Seems different if you can retrieve the text of a book by prompting the model with “Give me the text of X”. You can’t do that with the digits of pi.

> You can’t do that with the digits of pi

of course you can - pi contains all known combinations of digits.

If you wanted to extract a specific text from pi, you'd have to find the location of the text within pi. Expressed as an integer, this location would amount to an encoding of the entire text and would probably be longer than the text itself. You could only find the location by explicitly searching for the exact text. The location address would effectively be a copy of the text.

On the other hand, the "address" of a text within a memorizing large language model would just be the prompt "give me the text of X".

The argument is largely a philosophical (and therefore, legal) one.

The ease with which these "retrieval" operations can be done is irrelevant.

This is suspected, but has not actually been proven.

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