You don't even need to declare it. Declaring it only affects things like whether infringement is "willful" or not when deciding penalties. If you create a (US) copyrightable work, you retain the copyright by default. For it to not be under copyright you have to explicitly place it in the public domain.
Interestingly this came up when copilot was announced and one comment or another was “this will be an interesting bit of case law.”
Well now we have to see who wants to go first and establish precedent for the next half-century. :-)
GPT combines prompt, context and knowledge, it selects and adapts code. It even does problem solving: above average human rating on easy problems and 20% over humans on medium level problems. When did the xerox or parrot for that matter do that?
Yes, very smart and talented people have released ground breaking and amazing tools leveraging massively trained ML models. The model is not problem solving or intelligent in any sense of the word (take it from oai: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt)
"ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers..."
To be back on topic, I don't think some sweaty dude from the internet should be issued a copyright for typing "Minnie Mouse wearing a pikachu t-shirt!" into DALL-E and submitting the resulting image.
At the same time, I read a post like this one: https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw and I have really no objection to copyright being assigned. I think the difference is the human authorship, and I think the Copyright Office has made a pretty good first swag.
Code (or anything else) is not a “work” without the required element of human creative input.
Rights are a legal fiction anyway, so there are no a priori rights to anything.
They don't exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence.
A priori truths are, exactly and only, those things that are true by definition (and only exist within a particular axiomatic framework.)
You’ve described exactly why rights can only be a priori, but used it to deny that they are.
> They don’t exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence.
If things exist before they are defined by humans and human knowledge of them comes as a result of experience with their existence, that knowledge is a posteriori. You’ve marshalled a cogent explanation of why rights cannot be known a posteriori, but then presented as an argument for why they cannot be a priori.
It's also irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make how or whether humans have knowledge of some pre-existing things (through experience or through some other means).
Since you brought up axiomatic frameworks, I'll have to differ on that as well, as I don't think the majority of humans that talk about rights do so based on any kind of axiomatic framework, but rather on their biases and because they've essentially been brainwashed in to thinking that way through education, socialization, the media, peer pressure, parenting, etc..
So my view and Kant's view on this differ significantly, and while I give him credit for these terms, I don't subscribe to his views and don't feel bound to use these terms in the way Kant or Kantians would have me use them.
“Having a prior existence” is very much what a posteriori is (a priori or a posteriori are epistemic terms, they don’t refer to the thing itself, but to our knowledge of the thing, if our knowledge is independent of our experience [as it is with things with no prior existence of their own] then it is a priori, if it is derived from experience [as it is for things that have prior natural existence rather than being pure products of intellect] it is a posteriori.)
Sure, if you reverse the definition of a priori, it applies to exactly the opposite of the things it usually applies to, but that’s probably not the best way to communicate. (And this is literally the first time I've ever heard the suggestion of an English "colloquial sense" of that phrase, which is used exclusively, in my experience, as a technical term of art in epistemology (and is used in English largely because an imported Latin technical term won't conflict with any colloquial understanding that might attach to a more natural English alternative.)
> > Since you brought up axiomatic frameworks, I’ll have to differ on that as well, as I don’t think the majority of humans that talk about rights do so based on any kind of axiomatic framework, but rather on their biases and because they’ve essentially been brainwashed in to thinking that way through education, socialization, the media, peer pressure, parenting, etc..
That’s still an axiomatic framework, its just one that is practically useless to discuss because each of the things which you might like to be conclusions dependent on logic and a smaller set of simple principles are just independent axioms not subject to debate. And, yes, its very common.
Only specific things are copyrightable. There is nothing unusual (from a legal sense) in the government and others taking a stance on which things those should be and under what circumstances. You have no a priori right to copyright something because you fucked around with a prompt for a long time.
I don't see how they could go with a different stance given that all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright (IFF it is copyrightable, that is). This will fall apart it if it's possible for a company to have AI spew out eleventy-billion variation of training input and declare them all copyright.
Don't forget that in the early 90's we went through an era of records being yanked off the shelf at great cost to labels when the sampling laws finally settled. (Anyone else remember the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of Us3's "Hand on the Torch"? fond memories!)