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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

> It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use, due to its (generally) transformative nature

Purely mechanical modifications may not be considered transformative, and there's an argument to be made that LLMs are purely mechanical (in fact a US district court recently ruled that AIs cannot be authors of copyrighted works).

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> (in fact a US district court recently ruled that AIs cannot be authors of copyrighted works).

I thought that was because only humans and other legal persons can legally author things, not because of anything subtler about the nature of LLMs. See also the case where the monkey managed to take photos of itself. I'm not a lawyer, though.

> I thought that was because only humans and other legal persons can legally author things, not because of anything subtler about the nature of LLMs.

It very explicitly was and made a point of noting that it was not addressing anything about whether and when a human author could hold a copyright on a work authored using AI.

Correct, as usual, everyone interprets that case as 'OMG animals/AI created work is uncopyrightable!1!' but in reality it's just that animals/AIs cannot hold copyright. Whether a human using an AI can copyright the resulting work is still up in the air.

In the monkey-photo case, didn't the journalist attempt to assert copyright on the photo the monkey took with his camera, but was denied?

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