This feels very outdated. It was certainly an issue around the time of the NYT lawsuit, but I believe the companies responded hard to that "sanitize" their outputs to prevent obvious regurgitation like this. I'd be very surprised if you could reproduce this today.
This doesn't negate your point, but I believe the landscape has changed in response to this point.
That doesn't make it better. If you plagiarize something and then hide this by replacing words with synonyms and rewording stuff a bit it is still plagiarized. It is just harder to detect and to proof.
It regurgitated the output earlier and they are still using the same technique only scaled up. If they somehow fixed the underlying problem, they'd probably shout it from the roof-tops.
As the OP originally said, if it is verbatim (or even very obfuscated), then there should absolutely be a case here. But when it's concepts in reasoning to build a new work then it becomes a lot harder. The same would be said for someone watching a YouTube video, reviewing open source code, or a text book.
The good news is that there's a lot of case law that covers this already. The bad news is that it is only going to be plaintiffs with deep pockets that benefit here.
Now the process and artifacts (documentation, requirements, etc) going into the creation of said software is a different story and will prove providence of whomever paid for the tokens to generate the code.
Humans are not LLMs. Humans have not ingested the whole Internet. If an LLM is compared to a human, maybe we should also apply anti-slavery laws to it?
Not saying we can't have some legal fiction where they are treated the same, it should just be a conscious choice, not the default assumption.
I live in the EU, we actually have new regulation about this since it is something new that deserves thought on how it should be regulated. You can say if you want your material to be trained on or not. Next to no one does training in the EU...
Not better, just harder to see/prove. The problem of "same code, verbatim" has been solved, in a sense. Now we have trickier ones.
[−]FromTheFirstIn · 2026-11-15 Sun 18:19 UTC ·
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The fundamental technology is identical to compression- an LLM can be thought of as a dense and slightly lossy compression algorithm. Compression is clearly copying.
I keep waiting for someone to bring out DisneyGPT, which you can prompt with text to get image output. The fact that you get a near-exact reproduction of a Disney movie when you prompt it with a movie title and frame numbers would of course be completely coincidental...
I understand what you're saying but it is a poor legal argument. Overhearing a technical conversation, using your own learned knowledge, and building a clean room implementation could be considered compression in and of itself.
This doesn't negate your point, but I believe the landscape has changed in response to this point.
It regurgitated the output earlier and they are still using the same technique only scaled up. If they somehow fixed the underlying problem, they'd probably shout it from the roof-tops.
As the OP originally said, if it is verbatim (or even very obfuscated), then there should absolutely be a case here. But when it's concepts in reasoning to build a new work then it becomes a lot harder. The same would be said for someone watching a YouTube video, reviewing open source code, or a text book.
The good news is that there's a lot of case law that covers this already. The bad news is that it is only going to be plaintiffs with deep pockets that benefit here.
Now the process and artifacts (documentation, requirements, etc) going into the creation of said software is a different story and will prove providence of whomever paid for the tokens to generate the code.
I live in the EU, we actually have new regulation about this since it is something new that deserves thought on how it should be regulated. You can say if you want your material to be trained on or not. Next to no one does training in the EU...