Brief Note on "AI" and Copyright

I think the way to think about "AI" and literary and artistic works is that "AI" mechanically creates what the law calls "derivative works."* A derivative work is distinguished from a work influenced by previous work by a number of tests; originality is one of them. If, for instance, a large language model is asked to create a work in the style of Shakespeare, it is not creating an original work, even if the words have been rearranged; it is not capable of originality. Arguably—arguably!—works that are assembled from other works using a series of prompts might be considered at least partly original, but a great deal of the content is derived from works that were used to develop the language model.

If there must be mandatory licensing of existing works to the owners of "AI" systems, let the law assign fair royalty payments to the original authors or arists.

Citation

* Strong, William S. “Derivative Works.” In The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide, Sixth edition. The MIT Press, 2014. pp. 4-9.

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