A language model is not a human. You at least have the possiblity that the human learned something. The language model is a parrot with a large memory.

That said Microsoft didn't allow their kernel developers to look at Linux code for a reason.

What definition of learning are you using that makes humans not parrots and a deep learning system not learning?

I know current AI is very different from an organic brain at many levels, but I don't know if any of those differences really matters.

Go to a judge in a copyright case and argue that humans are parrots. Then tell me how it went.

And since you don't know if they matter, you should not presume that they don't.

It's more complicated, even if humans are involved. From https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Copyright_Issues

> Who can't contribute to Wine?

> Some people cannot contribute to Wine because of potential copyright violation. This would be anyone who has seen Microsoft Windows source code (stolen, under an NDA, disassembled, or otherwise). There are some exceptions for the source code of add-on components (ATL, MFC, msvcrt); see the next question.

I've seen a few MIT/BSD projects that ask people not to contribute if they have seen the equivalent GPL project. It's a problem because Copilot has seen "all" GPL projects.

Humans have rights, machines don't. Copyright is a system for protecting human intellectual property rights. You can't copyright things created by a monkey[1] for example. Thus it's not a contradiction to say that an action performed by a human is "transformative" while the same action performed by a machine is not.

But that is giving AI too much credit. As advanced as modern AI models are, they are not AGIs comparable to human cognition. I don't get the impulse to elevate/equate the output of trained AI models to that of human beings.

[1] https://thecopyrightdetective.com/animal-copyrights/

The AI did not create anything. It responded to a prompt given by a human to generate an output. Just like photoshop responds to someone moving the mouse and clicking or a paintbrush responds to being dragged across a canvas.

So any transformativity of the action should be attributed to the human and the same copyright laws would apply.

But under this model, the comparisons to human learning don't apply either. What matters is whether the output is transformative - so it's fair to compare the outputs of AI systems to one of the many inputs and say "these are too similar, therefore infringement occurred". It doesn't matter what kind of mixing happened between inputs and outputs, just like it doesn't matter how many Photoshop filters I apply to an image if the result resembles what I started with "too much".

Sure, just like a human can manually draw something that infringes copyright, they can use the AI to draw something that infringes copyright. It's the human infringing the copyright, not the AI.

But the fact that the human looked at a bunch of Mickey Mouse pictures and gained the ability to draw Mickey Mouse does not infringe copyright because that's just potential inside their brain.

I don't think the potential inside a learning model should infringe copyright either. It's a matter of how it's used.

I believe that you can copyright the image, it's the monkey that can't copyright it.

Why’s this matter? Corporations aren’t people.