> ‘There are legal tools and also rhetoric that are designed for dealing with this problem of "synthesising something that is identical to an existing thing", a

> ‘There are legal tools and also rhetoric that are designed for dealing with this problem of "synthesising something that is identical to an existing thing", and it's different tools and rhetoric from the ones we have for dealing with the problem of "stealing or copying existing things".’ Copyright law applies in both cases. If you create work that’s substantially similar to an existing one, you’re risking copyright infringement even if none of the original work’s content was reproduced in the mechanical sense. If this were not the case, why would cover bands pay the original artists for rights to the songs? “I learned to play ‘Yesterday’ by heart” doesn’t mean you can do anything with the song without paying the Beatles. The same applies to machine learning, if all the model has learned is to imitate copyrighted works.