> the physical encoding which definitely exists in my brain is a copyright violation
First of all, we don't really know how the brain works. I get that you're being a snarky physicalist, but there's plenty of substance dualists, panpsychsts, etc. out there. So, some might say, this is a reductive description of what happens in our brains.
Second of all, yes, if you tried to publish Harry Potter (even if it was from memory), you would get in trouble for copyright violation.
To me the primary difference between the potential "copy" that exists in your brain and a potential "copy" that exists in the LLM, is that you can't make copies and distribute your brain to billions of people.
If you compressed a copy of HP as a .rar, you couldn't read that as is, but you could press a button and get HP out of it. To distribute that .rar would clearly be a copyright violation.
Likewise, you can't read whatever of HP exists in the LLM model directly, but you seemingly can press a bunch of buttons and get parts of it out. For some models, maybe you can get the entire thing. And I'm guessing you could train a model whose purpose is to output HP verbatim and get the book out of it as easily as de-compressing a .rar.
So, the question in my mind is, how similar is distributing the LLM model, or giving access to it, to distributing a .rar of HP. There's likely a spectrum of answers depending on the LLM
> that exists in the LLM, is that you can't make copies and distribute your brain to billions of people.
I can record myself reciting the full Harry Potter book then distribute it on YouTube.
Could do the exact same thing with an LLM. The potential for distribution exists in both cases. Why is one illegal and the other not?
> I can record myself reciting the full Harry Potter book then distribute it on YouTube.
At this point you've created an entirely new copy in an audio/visual digital format and took the steps to make it available to the masses. This would almost certainly cross the line into violating copyright laws.
> Could do the exact same thing with an LLM. The potential for distribution exists in both cases. Why is one illegal and the other not?
To my knowledge, the legality of LLMs are still being tested in the courts, like in the NYT vs Microsoft/OpenAI lawsuit. But your video copy and distribution on YouTube would be much more similar to how LLMs are being used than your initial example of reading and memorizing HP just by yourself.
copyright is actually not as much about right to copy as it is about redistribution permissions.
if you trained an LLM on real copyrighted data, benchmarked it, wrote up a report, and then destroyed the weight, that's transformative use and legal in most places.
if you then put up that gguf on HuggingFace for anyone to download and enjoy, well... IANAL. But maybe that's a bit questionable, especially long term.
I don’t think the lawyers are going to buy arguments that compare LLMs with human biology like this.
Right but the physical encoding already exists in my brain or how can I reproduce it in the first place? We may not know how the encoding works but we do know that an encoding exists because a decoding is possible.
My question is… is that in itself a violation of copyright?
If not then as long as LLMs don’t make a publication it shouldn’t be a copyright violation right? Because we don’t understand how it’s encoded in LLMs either. It is literally the same concept.