> So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints.
I think it still does: IIRC, the current legal situation is AI-output does not qualify for IP protections (at least not without substantial later human modification). IP protections are solely reserved for human work.
And I'm fine with that: if a person put in the work, they should have protections so their stuff can't be ripped off for free by all the wealthy major corporations that find some use for it. Otherwise: who cares about the LLMs.
What if a person puts in the work, but the work was worthless or can be trivially reproduced without effort?
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
You mean like when I take a photo?
A photo is easy to take but hard to reproduce.
As is randomly splattering paint on a canvas, even with no artistic vision or skill.
I think you have a rather idealized model of IP in mind. In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.
> In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.
Then fix that instead of blowing it up. Because IP law is also literally the only thing that protects the little guy's work in many cases.
Arguments like yours are kinda unfathomably incomplete to me, almost like they're the remnants of some propaganda campaign. It's constructed to appeal to the defense of the little guy, but the actual effect would be to disempower him and further empower the wealthy major corporations with "big enough warchest[s]."
I mean, one thing I think the RIAA would love is to stop paying royalties to every artist ever. And the only thing they'd be worried about is an even bigger fish (like Amazon, Apple, or Spotify) no longer paying royalties to them. But as you said, they have a big enough war chest that they probably could force a deal somehow. All the artists without a war chest? Left out in the cold.
It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy.
It definitely does some of both, and we have no obvious measure or counterfactual to know otherwise.
You also have to take into account not just if optimal reform or optimal dismantle is better, but the realistic likelihood of each, and the risk of the bad outcomes from each.
Protect even more conceptual product ideas seems pretty strongly like it will result in more of a tool for big guys only, it's patents on crack and patents are already nearly exclusively "big guy crushes small guy" tool, versus copyright is at least debatably mixed.
Blowing up IP would sink the RIAA. They would no longer have legal grounds to go after file sharing, and I’m confident that given the same legal footing that file sharing would win any day of the week.
Does this matter in practice though? By modifying some of the generated code and not taking a solution produced by an LLM end-to-end but borrowing heavily from it, can't a human claim full ownership of the IP even though in reality the LLM did most of the relevant work?
I think as long as the human puts in substantial and transformational effort, they can claim to be the copyright holder of the entire work, yes.
Compare taking snapshots with a camera.
Because some photographer somewhere can claim to have put in a lot of effort, we all get IP protection for photographs by default.
> AI-output does not qualify for IP protections
I beg to differ. AI-output did not entitle the person creating the prompt for IP protections, so far – but my objection is not directed towards the "so far", but towards your omission of "the person creating the prompt", because if an AI outputs copyrighted material from the training data, that material is still copyrighted. AI is not a magical copyright removal machine.
The U.S. Supreme Court just declined to hear a case, thus upholding a lower court precedent that LLM output are not copyrightable: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de...
What this means in practice is that (currently), all output of an LLM is legally considered to not be copyrightable (to the extent that it's an original work). If it happens to regurgitate an existing copyrighted work, though, is that infringement? I'm not sure we have a legal precedent on that question yet.
There’s several large settlements that say Anthropomorphic/OAI didn’t want to have legal precedent. In general if it’s not outright regurgitated it would be derivative.
The out of court settlements that avoid precedent don't mean anything in a broader legal context. Legally speaking, right now in the USA, output of LLMs is not copyrighted and cannot be copyrighted (without substantial transformation by a human).
I don't think this means the same thing as whether or not LLM output can infringe on someone else's copyright though (that does pose an interesting question -- can something non-copyrightable in general infringe on something copyrighted?).
Of course. I cannot claim copyright on a poem that I have memorized as a child and written down as an adult. The original author can, though.