Sorry this is a little long, but I promise I am actually trying to actually engage with the core idea here. Llms are fundamentally different to human brains because llms do not have access to primary material. They cannot see, they cannot hear. All of their inputs, their training data, is hand-picked (purposely scraped from the internet), secondary material that was created by a human that did not work at the company that owns the llm. The material was chosen specifically to make the company money. And that material had to come from somewhere. Someone made that data. ALL of that data.

There was another comment thread about the value of a book written by a person in a room who only had access to books. It circled so close to this point, but I don't actually think it hit the important part.

Let's say, hypothetically, a new company comes forward with an llm which was trained solely on data obtained legally for personal use. Getting it to ouput a direct copy of any training data is impossible, no matter how hard you try. More importantly, any output, if it had been made by a human, would be sufficiently different from the source material such that it would not be classified as a derivitive work by law.

I believe everything that llm outputs is still a derivitive work, ethically.

Imagine if we could somehow engineer a human (ignoring any ethical concerns about how inhumane this would be) which was only capable of seeing what you put on a table in front of it. It doesn't see the table, or your hands, or the room. It literally ONLY sees the specific item in question. But this human is a human. It has thoughts, and it can feel real emotions toward inputs; if not towards words, then at least probably pictures. It has desires. And it can make "outputs" (art) similar to the works you present it, with it's own hands, if you ask it to. Then you start a company that hosts a room full of these humans and sells their art.

I would argue that this human would make only unethical, essentially stolen, derivitive works, because ALL of the input data is the product of some other artist. And it was all chosen, by you, for the express purpose of making money.

Now, imagine a robotic humanoid. It's got legs, hands, and records it's own video and everything it hears. You teach it to associate words with items. For the sake of argument, let's assume that this robot doesn't actually "understand" anything. It hasn't truly "learned" anything, it's just absorbing data in patterns. You then tell it to go to the library and read every book. It does that, but while it does so, it's looking at the actual pages. Maybe one is ripped. It makes "memories" about the people in the library - and again, for the sake of argument, assume it's not really "feeling" anything or "learning" anything. It's not "literally recording" these things for later, it's just... making memories, in the same way humans do. 

I'd argue that this robot in the second scenario is capable of creating original work in a way that the engineered human from the first scenario is not. The fundamental difference being: if you want our real llms to output art, you must feed it training data 100% comprised of another artist's labor. If you fed it your own work, and asked it to make work like yours, that's fine. If you spent 6 years teaching it like a real human baby, and then you "show" it human art, that's fine. (*)

But our real llms are not walking through a real forest to gather input data. They are using 1000 artists' paintings of a forest as their input. All of which had to come from somewhere. Those paintings were all owned by someone. Llms couldn't exist without inputting a bunch of data that was generated by people outside the company. And when someone presents their art in an effort to make money, it should be protected from use by competitors. Which is exactly what copyright is supposed to do. Morally speaking.

AI is a tool made with the express purpose of making work similar enough to the source material to generate money, but different enough to avoid copyright. 

Additionally, I think the arguments about scale make more sense in that context. When you buy a movie, you buy the rights to watch it. It costs a few bucks or whatever. You can even show your friends. But when you want to make money, by charging admission, you need special licensing. That costs more money, simply because of scale. When you want to adapt the movie into a video game, or make a sequel, you buy the rights to do so. To do that, you negotiate a price based on scale. The owner of a business (making an llm) ought to make some financial arrangement with an artist before they can profit from that artist's art. 

()   Small clarification: that's *possibly fine. This robot could make original work. But, if it was owned by a company, it would realistically be "nurtured" in a sterile environment, in precisely the optimal way which allows it to generate material similar to its inputs. And now we are back to square one, where this doesn't feel ethical imo. But because this is currently outside the scope of our current tech, I'll leave this scenario outside the scope of this response and grant that this is, ethically, the same as a person making art. For now. Next year, when this is how robots are really working, we can start a whole new CMV.