Comment by natebc
8 hours ago
Did something change? Is LLM generated stuff now able to be protected with copyrights?
I was under the impression that copyright was only available for works created by people.
8 hours ago
Did something change? Is LLM generated stuff now able to be protected with copyrights?
I was under the impression that copyright was only available for works created by people.
Copyright has never required the absence of tools, only the presence of human creative agency.
LLMs don’t change that. They’re just tools. The relevant question is whether a human exercised creative judgment in selecting, shaping, or editing the output. Which I most certainly did. Otherwise my month of work here would have just been a minute and a single prompt and then just grabbing a coffee.
We already handle this with cameras, compilers, spell-checkers, and procedural generation. If you push a button and accept whatever falls out, you may not have authorship. If you meaningfully direct and curate the result, you almost certainly do.
Responsibility still lands on the human, which is a good sanity check: there is no such thing as “LLM-authored but human-unaccountable” work. Pretending otherwise is just outsourcing epistemic responsibility to a stochastic tool. Similarly, you can't both assign blame to me when things go wrong, but credit to the LLM when things go right. Or vice versa.