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littlestymaartoday at 1:18 PM1 replyview on HN

We don't even have to do that: weights being entirely machine generated without human intervention, they are likely not copyrightable in the first place.

In fact, we should collectively refuse to abide to these fantasy license before weight copyrightability gets created out of thin air because it's been commonplace for long enough.


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mitthrowaway2today at 4:24 PM

There's an argument by which machine-learned neural network weights are a lossy compression of (as well as a smooth interpolator over) the training set.

An mp3 file is also a machine-generated lossy compression of a cd-quality .wav file, but it's clearly copyrightable.

To that extent, the main difference between a neural network and an .mp3 is that the mp3 compression cannot be used to interpolate between two copyrighted works to output something in the middle. This is, on the other hand, perhaps the most common use case for genAI, and it's actually tricky to get it to not output something "in the middle" (but also not impossible).

I think the copyright argument could really go either way here.

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