Selling this work would be copyright infringement. There’s no ambiguity there.

Generating it would not.

Generally people that are against overly broad patents and other copyrights should be dismissive of copyright claims of artists complaining about gpt. I remember Oracle being mocked for suing google over 9 lines of fairly generic code. Or Tiffany trademarking a color.

But now because Microsoft stands to benefit people are very concerned about "stolen" work. The funny thing is that the overall net benefit would be a lot greater from LLMs as opposed to someone not being able to use a certain color.

The biggest irony is that openai will obv prevail regardless. They'll pay their fines and work with regulators. The only thing that will be hurt will be competitors or open source projects

Even if someone is generating a new novel for themselves to read every day, it doesn’t seem likely to pass those tests so long as they are not distributing it.

>Generating it would not.

Are you sure about that? My understanding is that under US copyright law the copyright owner has the exclusive right "to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work."

Which is to say, a derivative work - which this would certainly be - would legally still be infringing even if it were not distributed.

It’s fair use though. You would have an extremely difficult time arguing that a piece of generated art for just yourself passes muster on:

> the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Because the effect of the use on potential market is just 1 sale and it’s not even clear that there’s a diminishing impact on the actual rights holder for that guy.

Regardless, the law itself seems clear that the right to adaptation is exclusive independent of distribution.

The fair use arguments are interesting, considering:

- AI businesses are commercial enterprises

- Many works were digested in their entirety by LLM systems

- If anyone can generate their own version of GoT with an AI system, does it diminish the market for the original?

In the threads, most comments dismiss the value of creators' works in building the billion-dollar businesses developing these increasingly-powerful content laundering machines, based almost exclusively on content theft.

Simultaneously, we're 10 years away from a world where staff "software engineers" go the way of human computers¹, replaced by product and marketing folks and maybe a system architect.

To those commenters, I say: I hope y'all have a Plan B.

¹ https://www.history.com/news/human-computers-women-at-nasa

Software engineering will change but it will not be gone. Those who learn how to use these tools will become more valuable than those who don't. Same with every profession.

...software developers have adapted to the newest tools and started working at a higher level of abstraction, just as we have been doing over and over since the beginning of the art.

It's probably Brandon Sanderson who should complain because there will be less of a market for completing unfinished series.