I’m afraid LLMs are making copyrights obsolete and unenforceable. If an author uses DeepSeek to write a book, piece of music, application, or patent did they break copyright? Is the new work protected if this is disclosed?
The new guidelines say that AI prompts currently don’t offer enough control to “make users of an AI system the authors of the output.”(AI systems themselves can’t hold copyrights.) That stands true whether the prompt is extremely simple or involves long strings of text and multiple iterations. “No matter how many times a prompt is revised and resubmitted, the final output reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI system’s interpretation, rather than authorship of the expression it contains,”
They are suppose to come out with guidance regarding the first question in a month or so.
Shining a torch at a plane is usually fine, shining a laser at them usually is a crime.
Blake Lemoine, 2.5 years ago, hired a lawyer to make this exact argument: https://www.businessinsider.com/suspended-google-engineer-sa...
Myself, every time this topic comes up, I point to the fact that the philosophy of mind has 40 different definitions of "consciousness" which makes it really hard for any two people to even be sure they're arguing about the same thing when they argue if any given AI does or doesn't have it.
(Also: They can be "persons" legally without being humans, cf. corporate personhood; and they can have rights independently of either personhood or humanity, cf. animal welfare).
What I meant ("none" is obviously a hyperbole, though not by much) is that people argue that "AI" (they always use this term rather than the more descriptive ML or LLM or generative models) is somehow special and either that the mixing of input material is sufficient to defeat copyright or that it somehow magically doesn't apply for reasons they either cannot describe or which include the word "intelligence".
Courts operate on provability (and for good reasons).
However, reality is I have used someone else's work and pretended it's my own. Now, ironically, there are cases where the act of masking it can be more time consuming than writing it from scratch. That is still plagiarism, although it might not be provable.
Second, seeing things in black and white is a fallacy. The amount obviously matters and what also matters is the _human_ work on top of the original work. LLMs are fundamentally different, human time (and work) has value, LLM time does not (it costs money to run but that is both different and inconsequential in comparison).
Third, you seem to forget that you can base academic work on that of other people, as long as you give proper credit. Just like are can base your code on that of other people, as long as you follow their code's license.