In addition to what you mentioned, I'd like to add that photos are copyrightable by the photographer, who merely tweaked some "hyper-parameters" (exposure, ISO,

In addition to what you mentioned, I'd like to add that photos are copyrightable by the photographer, who merely tweaked some "hyper-parameters" (exposure, ISO, aperture, whatever) and decided when and where to press a button. If such "minimal" amounts of authorship is considered sufficient, I won't be as confident as GP to claim that training an LLM, which requires orders of magnitudes more hyperparameters, labor and capital investment, to be uncopyrightable due to lack of human authorship involved. It might end up uncopyrightable due to other reasons, but probably not this. Btw, the phone directories are quite different -- they're just compilation of raw factual public domain information. The LLM weights are anything but. In fact one of the leading theories as to why LLMs are not copyrightable is that they infringe upon the copyrights of the source training materials. (I also don't want to guess whether that argument holds)