Content laundering is not a good way to describe it because it's misleading as it oversimplifies and mischaracterizes what a language model actually does. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. Training language models is typically a transparent and well-documented process as described by the mountains of research over the past decades. The real value comes from the weights of the nodes in the neural network and not the source that it spits out in its entirety when it was trained. The source material is evaluated and wholly transformed into new data in the form of nodes and weights. The original content does not exist as it was within the network because there's no way to encode it that way. It's a statistical system that compounds information.

And while LLMs do have the capacity to create derivative works in other ways, it's not all that they do, or what they always do. It's only one of the many functions that it has. What you say would probably be true if it was only trained on a single source, but that's not even feasible. But when you train it on millions of sources, what remains are the overall patterns of language within those works. It's much more sophisticated and flexible than what you describe.

So no, if it was cut and dry there would be grounds for a legitimate lawsuit. The problem is that people are arguing points that do not apply but sound reasonable when they haven't seen a neural network work under the hood. If anything, new laws need to be created to address what LLMs do if you're so concerned about proper compensation.

That is exactly what's going on here. Or they hate it enough that they don't mind making stuff up or mischaracterizing what it does. Seems to be a common thread on the Fediverse. It's not the first time this week I've seen it.

That's not a very good analogy because the band would be reproducing an entire work of art which an LLM does not and cannot. And by prompt manipulation I mean purposely making it seem like the LLM is doing something it wouldn't do on its own. The operating word is seem, which is what I meant by manipulation. The prompting here is irrelevant, but how it's done is. So unless The Times releases the steps they used to get ChatGPT to output what it did, you can't really claim that that's what it does.

In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.

If you passed them a sheet of music I'd say that's on you, it would be your responsibility to not sell recordings of them playing it.

Just like if I typed the first chapter of Harry Potter into word it is not Microsoft's intent to breach copyright, it would have been my intent to make it do it. It would be my responsibility not to sell that first chapter, and they should come after me if I did, even though MS is a corporation who supplied the tools.