Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

If I'm a college student writing an essay I have to "put the ideas into my own words" to show that I understand them or face accusations of plagerism. LLM's will similarly have to be careful to use their own language to express the underlying ideas. Original ideas are extremely rare (e.g. theory of relativity) and any author will have a tough time proving that they had the idea first. The vast majority of writing is reusing ideas that have already been expressed. Even stories that appear unique are similar to stories that people have been telling for ages as Joseph Campbell explained in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." The burden will be on the copyright holder to prove that the LLM steals their work after LLM's become as advanced as a college student putting into their own words.

Copyright doesn't apply to ideas. It applies to works, which are specific, complete expressions of ideas.

The problem artists have with LLMs is not that they routinely output copyrighted works (it can happen, but isn't common), but that they copy human-expressed knowledge and art styles on an industrial scale, thus destroying revenue streams that supported or encouraged creative expression in the past. I doubt this is going to be solved via existing copyright laws. I suspect that the need for disclosure of copyright on the source material is to build a case for more novel legal protections for artists down the line.

> Copyright doesn't apply to ideas. It applies to works, which are specific, complete expressions of ideas.

I was attempting to say that in my first sentence.

> they copy human-expressed knowledge and art styles on an industrial scale, thus destroying revenue streams that supported or encouraged creative expression in the past

I currently have no opinion on art works as my focus is on knowledge and LLMs. I just did a search on Amazon for "child care" and found 40,000 books on the subject. I doubt the world needs 40,000 books on child care so if LLMs remove the revenue stream from these authors maybe they will spend their time writing books the world needs.

Only if you ignore case law. OpenAI seems to have done a lot of work around music—I now find it much harder to trick GPT-4 into outputting song lyrics verbatim.

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