There's not really much of a debate, just a bunch of clamoring and wishful thinking by rightsholders who don't understand copyright law insisting that precedent should be subordinate to mimetic outrage over LLMs.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no direct precedent from any federal circuit addressing this issue and certainly no USSC opinions dealing with the issue. Additionally, any analogies drawn from precedent focused on other areas of intellectual property law is easily distinguishable. This is truly fresh legal ground and the next 10 years of jurisprudence will go a long way towards building the precedent that your comment would imply to already exist.
Just to be explicit, the above, while a legal opinion, IS NOT legal advice.
Arguably the material has been learned and not copied. Maybe in some cases learned with an uncanny ability or photographic memory, but learned. (People with photographic memories also cannot reproduce content in an unlimited fashion).
There's nothing special about an LLM, there's no learning, and they regurgitate verbatim text too.
May as well say curl + images in a db are learned as well, so thus I can use Mickey Miuse as I please in my php web page.
Let’s say that the model “is influenced by” the copyrighted material. That seems hard to argue against.
So, now that we aren’t using the word “learned”, why would we say that the way the models are influenced by the copyrighted works that appear in the “training set” (not to imply that “training” in the usual sense is happening) counts as a copyright violation?
Or, perhaps the claim is that the outputs of the model are violating copyright?
If the output is substantially similar to some particular copyrighted work that is in the “training set”, and could work as a substitute for that work, and if the output resembling the work is in part due to the influence that the work had on the model, I think in this case it would be a clear case of violation of copyright.
However, if it doesn’t have substantial similarity to any particular copyrighted work that influenced it, only similarity to the style common to many of the works that influenced it (even if all by the same author), my impression is that this would not constitute copyright infringement because styles are not protected by copyright, only individual works.
(Now, is this unjust, in the case of it copying the style of some particular author/artist? Idk, maybe? But my impression is that copyright doesn’t protect styles, and that it probably shouldn’t protect styles in general… so I guess maybe if we had a law making a special case forbidding the (deliberate?) copying of a person’s particular style via some kind of machine learning model? Idk.)
The model is 100-500x smaller than its training set. That is something hinting at learning, as direct storage is impossible.
Neither your comments to HN nor anyone else's strenuous assertions that there's anything to debate are going to change anything.
If you want to treat LLMs as a special case—which is what you want, since there is an entire history of jurisprudence that you have to contend with here—then you need to get Congress to write legislation that says so.
More than that, a constitutional amendment. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone.
The US does not have database copyright or "sweat of the brow" copyright. There has to be human originality.
The AI itself can be construed as a special kind of a database, given that it can be queried to reproduce at least part of its training dataset with precision...
No.
(That’s what the NYT tried to argue/show. I’m not sure if that case is ongoing or settled.)