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Comment by pocksuppet | Hacker News Reader

It's not a problem. If you give a work to an AI and say "rewrite this", you created a derivative work. If you don't give a work to an AI and say "write a program that does (whatever the original code does)" then you didn't. During discovery the original author will get to see the rewriter's Claude logs and see which one it is. If the rewriter deleted their Claude logs during the lawsuit they go to jail. If the rewriter deleted their Claude logs before the lawsuit the court interprets which is more likely based on the evidence.

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But the AI has the work to derive from already. I just went to Gemini and said "make me a picture of a cartoon plumber for a game design". Based on your logic the image it made me of a tubby character with a red cap, blue dungarees, red top and a big bushy mustache is not a derivative work...

(interestingly asking it to make him some friends it gave me more 'original' ideas, but asking it to give him a brother and I can hear the big N's lawyers writing a letter already...)

Except Claude was for sure trained on the original work and when asked to produce a new product that does the same thing will just spit out a (near) copy

Ok, but what if in the future I could guarantee that my generative model was not trained on the work I want to replicate. Like say X library is the only library in town for some task, but it has a restrictive license. Can I use a model that was guaranteed not trained on X to generate a new library Z that competes with X with a more permissive license? What if someone looks and finds a lot of similarities?

I wish you luck proving it wasn't trained on the original library or any work that infringed itself.

I think there could be a market for "permissive/open models" in the future where a company specifically makes LLM models that are trained on a large corpus of public domain or permissively licensed text/code only and you can prove it by downloading the corpus yourself and reproducing the exact same model if desired. Proving that all MIT licensed code is non-infringing is probably impossible though at that point copyright law is meaningless because everyone would be in violation if you dig deep enough.

This is what Adobe ostensibly is trying to do with their GenAI image model, Firefly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Firefly

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