How? You're creating artwork that is based off of the training data and is meant to replicate a subset of it.
I think, just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s) that you are recreating doesn't mean that that isn't what you're doing.
"just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s)"
Precisely, and neither can the owner of the copyright. Unless of course I rub into classical copyright issues ("these two art pieces look too similar") which goes back to my original question, why isn't just enforcing existing copyright law on bad ChatGPT users enough?
If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care?
I wouldn't, but presumably the person who you are immitating would.
The fallacy here is that you think an LLM is taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do.
No. It's taking billions of art pieces and then sampling them at various frequencies to create your art work. We can find your art work somewhere in the training data, it's just hard.
In essence, we're smuggling the copyright violation through convolution. Since these models are truly very large, we can pretend that there isn't copyright violation. But there is, we just can't really find it because LLMs cannot work backwards.
I don't think the human brain is doing this at all (except maybe if you're writing a satire or homage). Your writing is the sum total of all your experiences which includes everything you've ever read, a number that might (depending on your age) at least approach millions of tokens.
And just like an LLM you'd find it difficult to piece together your influences.
Ultimately these are tools, slaves to humans, meant for one thing only - to serve us. If they're not serving us, they should be eradicated. Because that's what we do.
Stealing from humans, no matter how convoluted, is bad. We shouldn't do that, and luckily that's completely optional and we don't have to stand for it. The computer programs can't fight back, it's okay.
So getting to the bottom of what is actually stealing or not will be important (we can't just unilaterally declare it so), and AFAICT if a user misuses it to regenerate copyrighted material that particular user is at fault, not the tool itself.