The use of large language models (“LLMs”) has exploded in recent years, including in the generation of source code. But even as their usage gains popularit...
An LLM, being a large database derived mechanically from its training data, seems to meet the definition of “derived work” as exists in most copyright legislation.
The output from an LLM, through the inference process, is also mechanically derived from that training data.
Lawmakers might try writing exceptions to please a stock market eagerly baying for hyperscaler growth. Despite that, it seems entirely viable that the copyright, held by humans on the training data fed to the LLM, continue to hold in the output derived from that input.
People saying it’s “obvious the output has no copyright”, or people who act as though it’s all free from any claim by the humans who wrote the works used as training data, are just showing their ignorance, it seems to me.
What creative transformation has that company done? It seems to me rather that the LLM is an entirely mechanical process with no creativity.
No more creative than what my ISP does when it conveys data from one machine to another.
We don’t allow the ISP to claim copyright in the data that it mechanically transforms. I don’t see why the company running an LLM would have any stronger claim of copyright in the output.
People learn from books and existing code. Does that means that anything we write is derived work?
An LLM knowledge matrix is a neural network, not a database. It does not contains an exact copy of any given text. It may remember it, but human brain can do the same.
You have to prove LLM code is derived work in the same way you prove human work is derived work: check the difference between the original work and the derived work.
Copyright grounds its justification in the creative expression of people. By creative transformation, new works can be created and some of those are deemed not restricted by copyright in the earlier work.
An LLM is not a person. An LLM has no mind and no creative expression. The training of an LLM and the inference from the LLM are, by definition, non-creative mechanical transformation from the input training data.
The copyright of the input work should, by this logic, survive whole in the output from that mechanical non-creative process. That is substantially different from the process by which humans learn and create.
An LLM, being a large database derived mechanically from its training data, seems to meet the definition of “derived work” as exists in most copyright legislation.
The output from an LLM, through the inference process, is also mechanically derived from that training data.
Lawmakers might try writing exceptions to please a stock market eagerly baying for hyperscaler growth. Despite that, it seems entirely viable that the copyright, held by humans on the training data fed to the LLM, continue to hold in the output derived from that input.
People saying it’s “obvious the output has no copyright”, or people who act as though it’s all free from any claim by the humans who wrote the works used as training data, are just showing their ignorance, it seems to me.
If so, the copyright of the slop would be by the company running the LLM.
So self hosted inference means you own it then?
What creative transformation has that company done? It seems to me rather that the LLM is an entirely mechanical process with no creativity.
No more creative than what my ISP does when it conveys data from one machine to another.
We don’t allow the ISP to claim copyright in the data that it mechanically transforms. I don’t see why the company running an LLM would have any stronger claim of copyright in the output.
People learn from books and existing code. Does that means that anything we write is derived work?
An LLM knowledge matrix is a neural network, not a database. It does not contains an exact copy of any given text. It may remember it, but human brain can do the same.
You have to prove LLM code is derived work in the same way you prove human work is derived work: check the difference between the original work and the derived work.
Copyright grounds its justification in the creative expression of people. By creative transformation, new works can be created and some of those are deemed not restricted by copyright in the earlier work.
An LLM is not a person. An LLM has no mind and no creative expression. The training of an LLM and the inference from the LLM are, by definition, non-creative mechanical transformation from the input training data.
The copyright of the input work should, by this logic, survive whole in the output from that mechanical non-creative process. That is substantially different from the process by which humans learn and create.