A photo is presumed to be copyrightable. Even horrible photos taken by somebody without any aesthetic sense are presumed to be copyrightable. The argument (AFAIK) is that the photographer chooses the time, location, object, and tweaks various settings of the camera (exposure, aperture, etc.), and these choices are considered sufficient for a photo to be copyrightable.
How about LLMs?
The hyperparameters of LLMs are hugely important in training LLMs, as is the choice of source training data. To me the "degrees of freedom" (and hence room for "creativity") in training LLMs are larger than that of a photographer taking a photo. And as of today, training a good LLM is probably objectively harder than taking a good photo, even if we forget about hardware costs for a moment.
It's easy to convince judges and juries that copying phone numbers into a phone book doesn't require human creativity. But we're talking about the most bleeding edge tech companies producing a bleeding edge new product here. I think it's going to be really hard to convince judges and juries that making this new shiny thing doesn't require human creativity. Maybe in say 20 years when even a 10 year old can train a LLM the situation might change, but as of today, quite unlikely IMHO.
A photo is presumed to be copyrightable. Even horrible photos taken by somebody without any aesthetic sense are presumed to be copyrightable. The argument (AFAIK) is that the photographer chooses the time, location, object, and tweaks various settings of the camera (exposure, aperture, etc.), and these choices are considered sufficient for a photo to be copyrightable.
How about LLMs?
The hyperparameters of LLMs are hugely important in training LLMs, as is the choice of source training data. To me the "degrees of freedom" (and hence room for "creativity") in training LLMs are larger than that of a photographer taking a photo. And as of today, training a good LLM is probably objectively harder than taking a good photo, even if we forget about hardware costs for a moment.
It's easy to convince judges and juries that copying phone numbers into a phone book doesn't require human creativity. But we're talking about the most bleeding edge tech companies producing a bleeding edge new product here. I think it's going to be really hard to convince judges and juries that making this new shiny thing doesn't require human creativity. Maybe in say 20 years when even a 10 year old can train a LLM the situation might change, but as of today, quite unlikely IMHO.