>Legal liability is completely unchanged.
It's changed completely, from your own example.
If you comission art from an artist who paints a modified copy of Warhol's work, the artist is liable (even if you keep that work private, for personal use).
If you commission it from OpenAI (by sending a query to their ChatGPT API), by your argument, you are the person liable — and OpenAI is off the hook even if that work is distributed further.
I'm not going to argue about the merits of creativity here, or that someone putting a prompt into ChatGPT considers themselves an artist.
That's irrelevant. The work is created on OpenAI servers, by the LLMs hosted there, and is then distributed to whoever wrote the prompt.
Models run locally are distributed by whoever trained them.
If you train a model on whatever data you legally have access to, and produce something for yourself, it's one thing.
Distribution is where things start to get different.
> If you commission it from OpenAI (by sending a query to their ChatGPT API), by your argument, you are the person liable — and OpenAI is off the hook even if that work is distributed further.
Let's distinguish two different scenarios here:
1) Your prompt is copyright-free, but the LLM produces a significant amount of copyrighted content verbatim. Then the LLM is liable, and you too are liable if you redistribute it.
2) Your prompt contains copyrighted data, and the LLM transforms it, and you distribute it. Then if the transformation is not sufficient, you are liable for redistributing it.
The second example is what I'm referring to, since the commercial LLM's are now very good about not reproducing copyrighted content verbatim. And yes, OpenAI is off the hook from everything I understand legally.
Your example of commissioning an artist is different from LLM's, because the artist is legally responsible for the product and is selling the result to you as a creative human work, whereas an LLM is a software tool and the company is selling access to it. So the better analogy is if you rent a Xerox copier to copy something by Warhol. Xerox is not liable if you try to redistribute that copy. But you are. So here, Xerox=OpenAI. They are not liable for your copyrighted inputs turning into copyrighted outputs.
>So the better analogy is if you rent a Xerox copier to copy something by Warhol
It isn't.
One analogy in that case would be going to a FedEx copy center and asking the technician to produce a bunch of copies of something.
They absolve themselves of liability by having you sign a waiver certifying that you have complete rights to the data that serves as input to the machine.
In case of LLMs, that includes the entire training set.
The most salient difference is that it's impossible to tell if an LLM is plagiarizing, whereas Xeroxing something implies specific intent to copy. It makes no sense to push liability onto LLM users.
Are you following the distinction between my scenarios (1) and (2)?
In scenario (1) the LLM is plagiarizing. But that's not the scenario we're discussing. And I already said, this is where the LLM is liable. Whether a user should be too is a different question.
But scenario (2) is what I'm discussing, as I already explained, and it's very possible to tell, because you yourself submitted the copyrighted content. All you need to do is look at whether the output is too similar to the input.
If there's some scenario where you input copyrighted material and it transforms it into different material that is also copyrighted by someone else... that is a pretty unlikely edge case.