> If it's used in a reference/"inspiration" capacity (as opposed to verbatim copying), I doubt the rightsholder have anything to stand on here. Sure, their works might have been used to make other competing works, but all art is derivative, and I don't see why it would be legal for a human artist to "train" on past works of art but not AI.
The "all art is derivative" line is essentially something people try to convince others of to justify breaking copyright law. It's not grounded in reality or law. It devalues creative work by implying the machine, with no lived experiences, is doing the same thing. And it's also completely wrong about what the specific term derivative work actually means in the context of copyright.
Derivative works deal in specific. If your LLM reproduces a substantial portion of the story beats from Jurassic Park, you can bet it'd wind up in court. If it reuses identifiable characters, that is usually gonna be derivative unless it can otherwise qualify under an exemption.
"But fanfic, fanart, etc." Is a common counterpoint but misses the commerce aspect of it. Here Open AI and similar are offering paid services based upon harvesting all of this information. When they produce for you the response to the prompt, they are, effectively, distributing that to you for money. That's the point at which it becomes a problem.
As an aside, it's an act of drinking the LLM Kool-Aid to believe it can be "inspired".
> Alleging that AI models can reproduce some works verbatim is probably the stronger argument, but AFAIK you have to coax them pretty hard to do so, and therefore AI companies might be able to argue they're tools like photocopiers or such.
They can try that argument but it'll fall flat when you consider that a photocopier is reproduction agnostic, while LLMs generally have a ton of work going into them to prevent them from outputting damaging things (and they still fail). That fact makes them not at all comparable to a photocopier, setting aside the more obvious "subscription software service" different.
Also, you "know" pretty wrong about the effort required.
For a recent example, see: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...
Here a number of people noticed getting specific producer tags basically unaltered in the output when just asking for songs of a certain genre, which then also often sound similar to existing songs.