Their main defence is that it's fair use because it's transformative (like a human reading a book, getting inspired, and writing something of their own) and not a copypaste illegal distribution (like a human scanning that book and selling it themselves).
Having models hallucinate copyright notices shows that some content is being copypasted as is, which kind of goes against the transformative argument.
(Note: I think that trying to litigate AI with current copyright laws is weird. They were created before LLMs were even imagined, so of course they can't handle them clearly. New laws are needed around this, not trying to bend over backwards to think about what a lawmarker a century ago would have thought about how transformative a thing they couldn't have imagined is.)
> which kind of goes against the transformative argument.
Indeed a good example. We've seen several examples of code snippets where this happens too, mentioned on HN.
But it does not prove that they infringed copyright by ingesting "illegal" stuff, as GP tried to argue. Seeing a verbatim string only "proves" that it came from a specific source. But not if this source was illegally acquired, which was my point.
Having models hallucinate copyright notices shows that some content is being copypasted as is, which kind of goes against the transformative argument.
(Note: I think that trying to litigate AI with current copyright laws is weird. They were created before LLMs were even imagined, so of course they can't handle them clearly. New laws are needed around this, not trying to bend over backwards to think about what a lawmarker a century ago would have thought about how transformative a thing they couldn't have imagined is.)