LLMs are as generative as they are derivative, and copyright law is just terrible at patrolling generative systems, where non-human entities generate novel work. Copyright gets less useful and more harmful the further it gets away from dealing with actual copies. Audio and video home taping both saw immense pushback by the recording industry – in Sony's case, setting different divisions at war with each other – but put a cheap and popular technology in the hands of billions and it wins.Ī lot of people who think about such things are awaiting the court cases that will help define the future of how copyright interacts with AI. As fandom has found, if enough people do it, it gets done. What LLMs bring to the fight is massive deployment. If you need more irony here, consider case law itself as a multi-century exercise in derivative work in an arena where copyright does not apply. Like its intellectual property sibling, fair use, there are general principles mostly derived from case law, but there are more gray areas than a foggy day in San Francisco. Derivative work has no hard and fast rules over how much derivation counts as making a work derivative. How will copyright law react to this? The irony is that while LLMs work by probabilities rather than algorithms, so does copyright. ![]() ![]() LLMs work like a general-purpose fandom, creating new ideas clearly derived from analysis of, among other things, copyright works. It's not that ChatGPT is science fiction that matters, it's that it's a science fiction fan. Now and again, if something approaches commercial escape velocity, copyright holders may step in, but as a wholesale, global and public display of scofflawyer behavior, science fiction and fantasy fandom is getting away with it.
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