> The logic being - if an AI without taint produces some other work, that work drew on the same information the model did, and came to the same "conclusion" - which means with a time machine, you could wipe the LLM, go back to the period of the original work, train the LLM, and produce the work contemporaneous to the original. Hope that made sense.
This logic would immediately get shot down by an "Objection, speculation" in an actual litigation. Besides, the technicalities of how the work was produced don't really play a role in assessing infringement. PK Dick wrote "The man in the high castle" by extensively using the I Ching, but if I use it and recreate the novel by complete accident I would still be infringing.
By the way, I highly suggest Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" as a great story on the topic of authorship :)
> PK Dick wrote "The man in the high castle" by extensively using the I Ching, but if I use it and recreate the novel by complete accident I would still be infringing.
I touched on this, with the comment that we love "first to market." That multiple people coming up with the same output may mean that the idea isn't that novel. whether that matters or not isn't really relevant to me.
The part you quoted was just a thought experiment to explain why i compared it to a "clean room implementation" - note it also avoids this argument from a sibling comment:
>need to show that the AI hadn't seen anything derived from that copyrighted work
since there could not possibly be any derived work prior to the "original" work being published. For the sake of argument.
This logic would immediately get shot down by an "Objection, speculation" in an actual litigation. Besides, the technicalities of how the work was produced don't really play a role in assessing infringement. PK Dick wrote "The man in the high castle" by extensively using the I Ching, but if I use it and recreate the novel by complete accident I would still be infringing.
By the way, I highly suggest Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" as a great story on the topic of authorship :)