I think it was Jess that made some interesting comments about how much influence and control over a model’s outputs that the individuals controlling the training and fine-tuning of the model have. She seemed to imply that it can be argued that the output of a model can be considered to be the speech of the model’s creator (she did caveat that there were of course nuances). If the output of the model is their speech, would that then mean that they have de-facto copyright over the output of a model (unless the author specifically disclaims that in their license terms)?

There are arguments that the copyright of the input training data can apply to the outputs of the model. Certainly verbatim copying of a specific training input into the output will do that, however unlikely that is to occur, but there have been numerous examples of it actually happening. I can’t pull up a good link now but I’ve definitely come across several sources of this in the past. Even more generically there is the argument that the output of a model are derivative of its inputs, thus copyright would transfer.

There are arguments claiming that the output of a model can be considered to be owned by the person prompting it. At least that was the argument for UK law. I think this is what most people assume is true, regardless of whether it actually is or not.

Then there’s the argument that the output of AI is not eligible for copyright at all. E.g. “given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to
make users of an AI system the authors of the output.” (congress.gov).

I’m a software developer. I don’t currently use AI/LLMs, partly because I’m not okay with making my workflows even more dependent on a handful of billion/trillion dollar companies, but also because there is so much legal uncertainty. I’d sure like some clear guidance on this, because frankly everybody seems to be burying their head in the sand about this at the moment.