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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

Everything humans make up also comes from source material.

The real (legal) question in either case, is how much is actually copied, and how obvious is it.

I mostly agree with you, but if a human straight up copies work under copyright they’re violating the law. Seems like a LLM should be held to the same standard unless they should be even less beholden to the law than people.

It’s also incredibly hard to tell if a LLM copied something since you can’t ask it in court and it probably can’t even tell you if it did.

From what I have seen, the (US) courts seem to make a distinction between 100% machine-automated output with no manual prompting at all, versus a human giving it specific instructions on what to generate. (And yes I realize everything a computer does requires prior instruction of some kind.)

But the issue with copyright I think comes from the distribution of a (potentially derivative or transformative in the legal sense) work, which I would say is typically done manually by a human to some extent, so I think they would be on the hook for any potential violations in that case, possibly even if they cannot actually produce sources themselves since it was LLM-generated.

But the legal test always seems to come back to what I said before, simply "how much was copied, and how obvious is it?" which is going to be up to the subjective interpretation of each judge of every case.

Not true. That's philosophical skepticism and was roundly refuted long ago.

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