we output nothing other than what we’re trained on; the only difference is that we’re allowed to roam the world freely and consume whatever information we stumble on

what you say would be true if the LLM were only trained on content by the author seeking to say that their works had been infringed, however these LLMs include a lot of other data from public domain sources

one could consider these public domain sources and our experience of the world to be synonymous (and if you don’t i’d love to hear the distinction), in which case there’s some kind of a line that you seem to be drawing, and again i’d love to hear where you think that line is

is it just ratio? there’s precedent to that for sure: current law has fair use rules which stipulate things like “amount and substantiality”. in that case the question becomes one of defining the ratio. certainly the ratio of content that the author is referring to vs the content not trained by the author is minuscule