Comment by Lerc
If you take that approach to fair use, don't you open the door to the same argument for copyright itself?
How do you distinguish between a tool and the director of a tool? I doubt people would say that a person is immune to copyright or fair use rules because it was the pen that wrote the document, not the person.
> don’t you open the door to the same argument for copyright itself?
Yes, it comes down to intentional control of output. Copyright applies when someone uses a pen to make a drawing because of the degree of control.
On the flip side there are copyright free photos where an animal picked up a camera etc, the same applies to a great deal of automatically generated data. The output of an LLM is likely in the public domain unless it’s a derivative work of something in the training set.