It's simple, GPT4 is using only the content on the internet to generate the output. Whether it used magic, understanding or fairy tales help it come up with the

It's simple, GPT4 is using only the content on the internet to generate the output. Whether it used magic, understanding or fairy tales help it come up with the output is the irrelevant middle part. I can look at a bunch of faces, consider my interactions with other faces IRL that aren't copyrighted or restricted and my output can be original because while I am informed of all the faces I have seen, the mona lisa I draw is an expression of thoughts and views not a mere modification based on my understanding of the concept of faces. In other words, LLMs use a prompt to do stuff, they don't just say and do things because they want to express themsleves, therefore their output is not their expression or the expression of their owners but a processing of their input based on the prompt. To simplify this even more, if a script parses the Linux Kernel's code and outputs some video game because the programmer told it to, and it's only input is the Linux kernel then is that video game subject to GPL? If a human reads that same code and writes a video game, even if that human only knows the kernel's code we can say that since humans think and apply their own ideas, the kenrel code was merely informative. Now, if GPT4 is able to use it's training data (internet) to output arbitrary content without being prompted and the results of a prompt are based on it's normal thought process that wis independent of a human prompt then you can argue it is like an assistant helping the prompter human, but right now it is a tool that "understands" (i disagree but that's a different debate) publicly available internet content and processes prompts based on that "understanding" without applying it's own ideas, feelings or thoughts. It can be argued that its output is a mere processing of largley copyrighted content, similar to re-encoding a copyrighted movie. I would think what makes or breaks this in a US court is the question of "can a reasonable person who knows how chargpt works look at a prompt, output and conclude part of the output at least was a mere processing of, as opposed to original content that was inspired by the copy righted content?"