A New York Times copyright lawsuit could kill OpenAI::A list of authors and entertainers are also suing the tech company for damages that could total in the billions.
If OpenAI owns a Copyright on the output of their LLMs, then I side with the NYT.
If the output is public domain--that is you or I could use it commercially without OpenAI's permission--then I side with OpenAI.
Sort of like how a spell checker works. The dictionary is Copyrighted, the spell check software is Copyrighted, but using it on your document doesn't grant the spell check vendor any Copyright over it.
I think this strikes a reasonable balance between creators' IP rights, AI companies' interest in expansion, and the public interest in having these tools at our disposal. So, in my scheme, either creators get a royalty, or the LLM company doesn't get to Copyright the outputs. I could even see different AI companies going down different paths and offering different kinds of service based on that distinction.
I think it currently resides with the one doing the generation and not openAI itself. Officially it is a bit unclear.
Hopefully, all gens become copyleft just for the fact that ais tend to repeat themselves. Specific faces will pop up quite often in image gen for example.
If LLMs like ChatGPT are allowed to produce non-copyrighted work after being trained on copyrighted work, you can effectively use them to launder copyright, which would be equivalent to abolishing it at the limit.
A much more elegant and equitable solution would be to just abolish copyright outright. It's the natural direction of a country that chooses to invest in LLMs anyways.