It depends what they do with their revelations. If a medium has James Joyce's Ulysses revealed to her, writes it down, and publishes it, then yes, copyright law applies. Now if she does something like what Stephen Wolfram or Stuart Kauffman might do, which is take the gist of the revelation, write it down in their own words and fail to credit whoever inspired it ... well, I guess not.
But, again, ChatGPT doesn't *execute* at all in the same way Wolfram or Kauffman execute. It is way more distributed across space (and maybe time - though maybe it's less distributed across time ... arguable). We can wrap Wolfram or Kauffman in a net and carry them around. We can't do that with ChatGPT. So is ChatGPT re-distributing the content upon which it was trained? I'd argue yes. But it's less re-distributing than, say, Llama 3 is. Proprietary models like ChatGPT are in the middle on a spectrum (or multidimensional space of types) of distribution between a human (not distributed) to open-source models. The caveat there is that because it's got a UI and an API, there may be vulnerabilities ... leakage. So exactly where they are on that spectrum is questionable. On 4/14/25 1:34 PM, Prof David West wrote:
Nicholas Carr suggested that one way to think about ChatGPT etc, was as clairvoyants. They are not creating text out of nothing, but are accessing a vast digitized Spiritus Mundi of human expression in the past and, from that blending something new and intelligible and interpretable by human beings. When conversing with chatbots we are, in a way, communicating with the dead. Are mediums subject to copyright law?
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