I believe there are still ongoing lawsuits on this in various places, I don't believe it's fully settled law - though, as I mentioned in my post, I also don't expect there is any realistic chance for the courts to simply shut down a trillion dollar industry, as such a decision likely would.
I do believe though that, if the LLMs were found to be derivative works of their training set, it would follow almost directly that their output is also a derivative work of that same training set - given how these LLMs operate. And even if the liability fell with the LLM providers (which may not be so clear cut for, say, local models, fine tuning, etc), that would still mean everyone would have to excise any LLM generated content they are distributing.
> were found to be derivative works of their training set, it would follow almost directly that their output is also a derivative work
I doubt so. Let's say Harry Potter is in the training set and you ask the LLM to generate a quick sort function in C, is that quick sort function a derivative of Harry Potter? What if you ask the LLM to output some known public domain work? That leads to a contradiction where according to one definition, the work is public domain and according to the other, it is a derivative of Harry Potter. It seems to me that there's no other option but to consider each output on its own merit.
I do believe though that, if the LLMs were found to be derivative works of their training set, it would follow almost directly that their output is also a derivative work of that same training set - given how these LLMs operate. And even if the liability fell with the LLM providers (which may not be so clear cut for, say, local models, fine tuning, etc), that would still mean everyone would have to excise any LLM generated content they are distributing.