The courts are pretty clear, without the human hand there is no copyright. This goes for LLM's and monkeys trained to paint...
large language MODEL. Not ai, not agi... it's a statistical infrence engine, that is non deterministic because it has a random number generator in front of it (temperature).
Anthropomorphizing isn't going to make it human, or agi or AI or....
To me, "acting like a human" is quite distinct from being a human or being afforded the same rights as humans. I'm not anthropomorphizing LLMs so much as I'm observing that they've been built to predict anthropic output. So, if you want to elicit specific behavior from them, one approach would be to ask yourself how you'd elicit that behavior from a human, and try that.
For the record, my current thinking is that I also don't think ML model output should be copyrightable, unless the operator holds unambiguous rights to all the data used for training. And I think it's a bummer that every second article I click on from here seems to be headed with an ML-generated image.
This doesn't seem that human: https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/01/chatgpt_poetry_ai/
How far removed is that from: Did you really name your son "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--" ?
I think that these issues probalisticly look like "human behavior", but they are leftover software bugs that have no been resolved by the alignment process.
> unless the operator holds unambiguous rights to all the data used for training...
So on the opposite end of the spectrum is this: https://www.techdirt.com/2007/10/16/once-again-with-feeling-...
Turning a lot of works into a vector space might transform them from "copyrightable work" to "facts about the connectivity of words". Does extracting the statistical value of a copyright work transform it? Is the statistical value intrinsic to the work or to language in general (the function of LLM's implies the latter).
Agreed; that’s why I was very careful to say “one approach.” I suspect that technique exploits a feature of the LLM’s sampler that penalizes repetition. This simple rule is effective at stopping the model from going into linguistic loops, but appears to go wrong in the edge case where the only “correct” output is a loop.
There are certainly other approaches that work on an LLM that wouldn’t work on a human. Similar to how you might be able to get an autonomous car’s vision network to detect “stop sign” by showing it a field of what looks to us like random noise. This can be exploited for productive reasons too; I’ve seen LLM prompts that look like densely packed nonsense to me but have very helpful results.
What if I prompt it dozens of times, iteratively, to refine its output?
What if I use Photoshop generative AI as part of my workflow?
What about my sketch-influenced drawing of a Pelican in a fancy hat here? https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/111489351875265358
A literal monkey, who paints, has no copyright. The use of human hand is quite literal in the courts eyes it seems. The language of the law is its own thing.
>> What if I prompt it dozens of times, iteratively, to refine its output?
The portion of the work that would be yours would be the input. The product, unless you transform it with your own hand, is not copyrightable.
>> What if I use Photoshop generative AI as part of my workflow?
You get into the fun of "transformative" ... along the same lines as "fair use".
LLMs modelling humans well enough to be fooled like humans, doesn't require them to be people in law etc.
(Also, appealing to what courts say is terrible, courts were equally clear in a similar way about Bertha Benz: she was legally her husband's property, and couldn't own any of her own).