• hperrin@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office’s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output. For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare’s style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.

    That seems very clear to me. Generative AI output is not human authored, and therefore not copyrighted.

    The policy I use also makes very clear the definition of AI generated material:

    https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/#Definitions

    I’m not exactly sure how you can possibly think there is an equivalence between a tool like a spelling and grammar checker and a generative AI, but there’s a reason the copyright office will register works that have been authored using spelling and grammar checkers, but not works that have been authored using LLMs.

    • theherk@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Just read the next two paragraphs. Don’t just stop because you got to something that you like. The equivalence I draw is clear. You don’t like it, and that’s okay. But one would have to clarify exactly what the ban entails, and that wouldn’t be as clear as you might think. LLM’s only, transformers specifically, what about graph generation, other ML models? Is it just ML? If so, is that because a matrix lattice was used to get from input to output? Could other deterministic math functions trigger the same ban? What is a spell checker used RNG to select best replacement from a list of correct options? What if a compiler introduces an assembled output with an optimization not of the authors writing?

      Do you see why they say “The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work. This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry”?

      And that still affects copywriteability, not license compliance.

      • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        Do you want to explain to me what, in those two paragraphs, means that the use of spell checkers and LLMs is equivalent with regard to copyrightability? It seems like those paragraphs make it clear that the use of spell checkers is not the same as LLMs.

        The policy I use bans “generative AI model” output. Generative AI is a pretty well defined term:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_AI

        https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generative AI

        If you have trouble determining whether something is a generative AI model, you can usually just look up how it is described in the promotional materials or on Wikipedia.

        Type: Large language model, Generative pre-trained transformer

        - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_(language_model)

        I never said it violates GPL to include public domain code. I’m not sure where you got that from. What I said is that public domain code can’t really be released under the GPL. You can try, but it’s not enforceable. As in, you can release it under that license, but I can still do whatever I want with it, license be damned, because it’s public domain.

        I did that with this vibe coded project:

        https://github.com/hperrin/gnata

        I just took it and rereleased it as pubic domain, because that’s what it is anyway.