alt Hacker NewsIt's beyond obvious that a LLM cannot have copyright, any more than a cat or a rock can. The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law. As far as I can see, it depends on the extent of the user's creative effort in controlling the LLM's output.
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According to the law, if I use Claude to generate something, I hold the copyright granted Claude didn’t verbatim copy another project.
It is not "beyond obvious" that a cat cannot have copyright, given the lawsuit about a monkey holding copyright [1], and the way PETA tried to used that case as precedent to establish that any animal can hold copyright.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
It may be obvious to you, but it has lead to at least one protracted court case in the US: Thaler v. Perlmutter.
> The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law.
Its is going to vary with copyright law. In the UK the question of computer generated works is addressed by copyright law and the answer is "the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken"
Its also not a simple case of LLM generated vs human authored. How much work did the human do? What creative input was there? How detailed were the prompts?
In jurisdictions where there are doubts about the question, I think code is a tricky one. If the argument that prompts are just instructions to generate code, therefore the code is not covered by copyright, then you could also argue that code is instructions to a compiler to generate code and the resulting binary is not covered by copyright.