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To me the key difference is that Wikipedia summaries are written by a human, and so creativity imbues them with new copyright.

OpenAI outputs are an algorithm compressing text.

A jpeg thumbnail of an image is smaller but copyright-wise identical.

An OpenAI summary is a mechanically generated smaller version, so new creative copyright does not have a chance to enter in



The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two.

Additionally, if human summaries aren't copyright infringement, you can train LLMs on things such as the Wikipedia summaries. In this situation, they're still able to output "mechanical" summaries - are those legal?


> The issue becomes there's little to no way to tell the difference between the two.

If you and I write the exact same sentence, but we can prove that we did not know each other or have inspiration from each other, we both get unique copyright over the same sentence.

It has never been possible to tell the copyright status of a work without knowing who made it and what they knew when they made it.


Also, the human produced summary is likely to have been produced by people who have read purchased books (i.e. legally distributed) whereas the algorithmic production of a summary has probably been fed dubious copies of books.


I don't think that matters. A new copyright would just mean there are now multiple copyrights. It does not eliminate the original.


To add to your points, Wikipedia also generally cites its sources, whereas LLMs do not. I believe this is a significant distinction.


This.

Also there is fair use gray area. Unlike Wikipedia, ClosedAI is for profit to make money from this stuff and people using generated text do it for profit.


So if OpenAI stayed a non-profit, they'd be okay?


yes?


Are you religious? If not, you should assume that your cognition is a product of your body, a magnificent machine.

I don't think LLMs are sapient, but your argument implies that creativity is something unique to humans and therefore no machine can ever have it. If the human body IS a machine, this is a contradiction.

Now, there's a very reasonable argument to be made concerning the purpose of copyright law, but "machines can't be creative" isn't it.


Creativity is not unique to humans, but legal rights to protect creativity is unique to humans (or human-represented organizations). Humans are always special case in law.

Selling human livers and selling cow livers are never treated the same in terms of legality. Even the difference between your liver and that of a cow is much, much smaller than the difference between your brain and Stable Diffusion. I'm sure there isn't single biochemical reaction that is unique to humans.


Converting a raw 8k video down to 1080p is a full of creative solutions and its perfectly fine to see it as the machine doing some form of creativity when optimizing performance and file size. In similar way, compilers are marvelous and in many cases ingeniously when building and compiling binaries from source code.

It is however general agreed on those do not create independent original works. At the most generous interpretation they get defined as derivatives, and at the more common interpretation they are plain copies. The creativity is also usually not given to the machine, but those who built the machine. Even if the programmer is unable to predict all outcomes of creative written code, a unpredictable outcome is still attributed to the programmer.


I am not religious, but our legal system does treat the human brain, and products therof, as unique.

Remember the monkey selfie thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

It was ruled that our Copyright Law does require that a Human create the work, and that only a Human can hold copyright. The monkey was not given copyright over the image it took.

Monkeys obviously can be creative. However, our law has decided that human creativity is protected by copyright, and human creativity is special within the law. I don't see any contradictions or arguments about sapience that are relevant here.




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