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   Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 05-Sep-2026 12:10:01 JST Rich Felker

   in reply to

   • Mark T. Tomczak

   @mark @mirabilos I'm sorry but you're wrong.

   If you take a copyrighted work W and apply a function F to it, copyright law does not give any exclusive rights over F(W) to whoever decided to apply F to W. It is, however, a derivative of W, and any use of the result is subject to that party's copyright on W.

   None of this is hard or novel. People are only pretending it's complex because they're drunk on the AI hype train.

   • Embed this notice
     Mark T. Tomczak (mark@mastodon.fixermark.com)'s status on Saturday, 05-Sep-2026 12:10:02 JST Mark T. Tomczak

     @mirabilos @dalias

     Do you know how computers work?

     Gosh I hope so, or this computer science degree and following career has been an elaborate fabrication. ;)

     I think you might be flipping the logic arrow on this problem. You seem to be implying that it's created by a deterministic algorithm and therefore it can't be transformative. Unfortunately, deterministic algorithms can be applied to vast, vast quantities of copyrightable material. Proven copyrightable material, like this isn't even up for debate. That's the universality of computing.

     So clearly, you can't reduce the question to "It's just a deterministic algorithm." That's too broad a constraint.

     The questions that the law addresses are the ultimate purpose of the work, whether the changes enacted upon it make it an entirely different kind of thing. And I think the law argues, and I would agree with it, that using the content of the New York Times to train a large language model (along with content from other sources) is self-evidently transformative. I can't pick up a New York Times and shake it and have a novel New York Times shaped article just fall out of it. Clearly, feeding the content through a training algorithm is doing something significant here.

     Plus, at the end of the day the purpose of copyright in the United States is the promotion of science and the useful arts. That's the lens through which all of this is viewed. And the courts broadly seem to be coming down on the side of LLM-AI being exactly the kind of science that copyright and patent are intended to promote.