Remember lawsuits aren’t beyond a reasonable doubt the standard is much lower.
Remember lawsuits aren’t beyond a reasonable doubt the standard is much lower.
Without details of what specific data a language model was trained on, there is no way to differentiate it having retrieved that name from a review of the book that was used with permission from the author (which is their own copyright and fair use on its own) or from the books itself (which would be copyright infringement).
If those records don't exist, the only mechanism you have left is to try and get the language model to spit out sufficient verbatim text from the source material to cross the fair use threshold. This doesn't work in the case of "obvious extrapolation" either which is a whole other defense that could be used depending on what that body produced was (If knowing only that the main character is named Harry, who is a wizard going to a wizarding school in the British countryside is required to produce a couple of close looking paragraphs, you need a much closer match with the original text over those two paragraphs for it to be infringing).
The value of names to copyright holders is simply how distinct they are. John Smith isn’t particularly unusual but if you name a bounty hunter Boba Fett it’s hard to argue originality. Complete originality isn’t required as long as you’re safely inside a fair use exception, but overwhelming originality is required.
So it’s generally safer for a character to talk about their favorite parts of Star Wars than have your stories plot be a group of rebels trying to destroy a planet killing doomsday weapon guarded by a sword wielding space wizards.
My point is that the meaning of "copying" as described here is unclear unclear if it's not restricted to verbatim plagiarism. As is "elements", for that matter.