It’s going to be a long while before lawyers and judges will be confident enough to pursue and make judgments about generative AI and copyright, exactly because

It’s going to be a long while before lawyers and judges will be confident enough to pursue and make judgments about generative AI and copyright, exactly because so many novel considerations apply when the association between any given input and the work is essentially inexplicable. There’s precedent in musical sampling, visual collage and assemblage, and poetic cutups, but they don’t provide authoritative answers. By the time the courts or regulators are ready move on the issue, the practice will be so established by big commercial efforts like Copilot that my money is on a fairly permissive approach if only because of inertia.