This is exactly why something more advanced than copyright is needed to protect human creative endeavour against AI appropriation. Copyright is demonstrated here not to be up to the job but it doesn’t mean there isn’t regulation needed to give human creators rights and a reward for their contribution
What you are saying leads to "pulling the ladder behind you" effect on creativity. It's impossible to protect more than substantial similarity and still allow creativity to exist.
If a human makes something there should be broad protection for creativity, if a LLM generates something there should be extremely limited protection for creativity.
You should not be able to mass generate images in a particular artists style and claim it as fair use, even if a human making the same images would have protection.
But the human made the LLM. An LLM is categorically “I built a thing that built a thing” and if the output of that category has no protections then all automation and ‘machine at the final step’ is in trouble.
What about aleatory music (music left at least partially to chance)? Or Autechre - they have whole albums and live performances built on automation software. They built the logic and added randomization, necessarily removing themselves from the final output.
Is spin art not copyrightable? If I build a simple machine that spins paper, then do no more than drop paint on it, the result is not mine to copyright? I didn’t choose the output, I merely built the machine and the rest was created by pure chance. “But you chose the paint” - and if I didn’t? What if my art uses AI to perform sentiment analysis on the top news articles of the day and it drops colors matching the emotional tone of the news onto the spin art machine. I have no control over it and the output is machine generated, but is the result not just the final step of an entire process I created? Was the result of the creative idea not part of the creativity itself?
If I build an automated laboratory to test every combination of a problem space, is a resulting success not patentable? What if the problem is too large to permute, so I added a random selection process to it? I’m not even controlling what’s being tested, but if it finds success is that not my contribution? The machines did the work, the selection was random, there was no human in the loop; what then?
The internals of an LLM may be mysterious to some, but I assure you it’s just fixed automation with a random number generator sometimes tacked onto it, but randomization is optional too.
I built that LLM. I decided what text to input for training, I curated the information, I wrote the algorithm, I decided the layers and hyper-parameters, I decided the RLHF pairs to train, then I put a few drops of paint from my bottle of language into the automated machine. I decided and built every single step of the system, but that output is not part of my process? If I pipe the LLM text output to a paint dispenser hovering over paper, set to squeeze out drops based on syllables, would you protect my artwork then?
The solution is… more copyright laws? Noooo thank you