Transformative use doesn't necessarily mean copyrightable. Google's thumbnails are a purely mathematical transformation on images (no copyright themselves), an

Transformative use doesn't necessarily mean copyrightable. Google's thumbnails are a purely mathematical transformation on images (no copyright themselves), and yet are considered a transformative use. I believe that trained models are similarly a purely mathematical transformation of {data}, but is transformative in what that can be used for going forward. "Can" bearing a lot of weight in that sentence. It's how the human, with agency, uses the model that may be a derivative or copyright infringing use - not the model itself nor necessarily the output. The output of a generative AI may be similar enough to an existing work that it is derivative of that work. It is possible to construct a prompt that infringes on an existing work even if that work wasn't part of the training data. For that case, consider you drew a picture. That picture that you just drew isn't part of any training data. I could presumably look at it and describe it with sufficient detail that something similar enough would be generated... and that may be considered a derivative work. The same test could be applied to me describing it to someone on Fiverr with the same outcome. If I were to publish that work by the generative AI or Fiverr - who would be infringing on copyright? me? or the black box that may be AI or Fiverr that created a picture based on my prompts?