> Anyway, suppose you’re building an AI to walk, there’s nothing creative about selecting 9.8m/s/s for gravity that’s simply the ideal value to achieve a desired goal.
Suppose you're not building a strawman, but instead building an AI to be an LLM. The exact sequence of what you choose to do for instruction tuning, and the metrics and labels that you choose, the prompt/response pairs you write, and the loss functions you employ are quite creative. They greatly affect the coefficients and are not simple mechanical steps and are the result of a large amount of creative choice.
We are nowhere near a point where they are an uncreative, mechanical recipe to follow.
> Just because a person is holding a camera and taking a photo doesn’t mean the result is copyrightable.
No, but in the overwhelming majority of circumstances it is. What it depends upon is whether the person holding the camera is making a significant, original creative choice.
I am not sure what courts will decide, but I am certain that there is more creativity and originality employed than you are giving OpenAI et al. credit for.
> not simple mechanical steps and are the result of creative choice
Creative choices requires intentional control over the output across a meaningfully different range of viable possibilities. A brick layer has a huge range of viable options in the specific brick and its alignment in a wall but none of those choices are artistically meaningful.
The coefficients are also not in any meaningful sense chosen based on instruction tuning. It’s no more under direct control than the specific arrangements of atoms in the brick wall and is instead the output of a purely mechanical process.
> We are nowhere near a point where they are an uncreative, mechanical recipe to follow.
Thus: We are nowhere near the point where the output is under creative control rather than being the result of a poorly understood mechanical recipe.
> Factual compilations, on the other hand, may possess the requisite originality. The compilation author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the collected data so that they may be used effectively by readers. These choices as to selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently by the compiler and entail a minimal degree of creativity, are sufficiently original that Congress may protect such compilations through the copyright laws. Nimmer ss 2.11[D], 3.03; Denicola 523, n. 38. Thus, even a directory that contains absolutely no protectible written expression, only facts, meets the constitutional minimum for copyright protection if it features an original selection or arrangement.
Alphabetical order wasn't quite enough. But people directing the work that produces the coefficients are doing considerably more creative work than that.
> Thus: We are nowhere near the point where the output is under creative control rather than being the result of a poorly understood mechanical recipe.
No one requires complete creative control of the output. I can spatter paint and have relatively poor control of what's happening, but I am certainly generating a copyrightable work when I engage in creative choices as part of this.
> Alphabetical order wasn’t quite enough, But people directing the work that produces the coefficients are doing considerably more creative work than that.
I agree it’s more effort but the metric isn’t effort so I disagree that qualifies the coefficients as copyrightable. The SHA256 hash of a movie isn’t copyrightable even though the movie itself was.
> No one requires complete creative control
That’s a strawman, there are requirements for creative control. You don’t own copyright to your normal dumps, but you can get copyright from looking down and selecting to take a picture. That’s the low bar for a creativity requirement, but it exists.
> I agree it’s more effort but the metric isn’t effort so I disagree that qualifies the coefficients as copyrightable.
I know the metric is no longer effort. But there's a lot of creative choices that I've mentioned that greatly affect the coefficients, even if we don't know what those creative choices are going to do to each film grain in the photograph or coefficient in the matrix.
> You don’t own copyright to your normal dumps
Yes, there's an explicit exemption in LOC's guidelines for things that are the direct output of natural processes.
If you have a lot of choices affecting output, then the output is subject to copyright. Indeed, the Supremes above said that factual contemplations can qualify if they involve a "minimal degree of creativity".
Suppose you're not building a strawman, but instead building an AI to be an LLM. The exact sequence of what you choose to do for instruction tuning, and the metrics and labels that you choose, the prompt/response pairs you write, and the loss functions you employ are quite creative. They greatly affect the coefficients and are not simple mechanical steps and are the result of a large amount of creative choice.
We are nowhere near a point where they are an uncreative, mechanical recipe to follow.
> Just because a person is holding a camera and taking a photo doesn’t mean the result is copyrightable.
No, but in the overwhelming majority of circumstances it is. What it depends upon is whether the person holding the camera is making a significant, original creative choice.
I am not sure what courts will decide, but I am certain that there is more creativity and originality employed than you are giving OpenAI et al. credit for.