It may be obvious to you, but it has lead to at least one protracted court case in the US: Thaler v. Perlmutter.

> The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law.

Its is going to vary with copyright law. In the UK the question of computer generated works is addressed by copyright law and the answer is "the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken"

Its also not a simple case of LLM generated vs human authored. How much work did the human do? What creative input was there? How detailed were the prompts?

In jurisdictions where there are doubts about the question, I think code is a tricky one. If the argument that prompts are just instructions to generate code, therefore the code is not covered by copyright, then you could also argue that code is instructions to a compiler to generate code and the resulting binary is not covered by copyright.

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galaxyLogic 2 days ago | parent [-]

The binary should be considered "derived work". Only the original copyright owner has the exclusive right to create or authorize derivative works. Means you are not allowed to compile code unless you have the license to do so. Right?

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graemep 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, so is LLM generated code a derivative work of the prompts? Does it matter how detailed the prompts are? How much the code conforms to what is already written (e.g. writing tests)?

It looks like it will be decided on a case by case basis.

It will also differ between countries, so if you are distributing software internationally what will be a constraint on treating the code as not copyrightable.

	▲	galaxyLogic 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> is LLM generated code a derivative work of the prompts? Very good question I would think it is. You are just using a mechanical system to transform your prompt to something else, Right? But, a distiguishing factor may be that: 1. Output of the LLM for the same prompt can vary 2. So you don't really have "control" over what the AI produces 3. Therefore you should not get a copyright to the output of the LLM because you had very little to say about how that transformation (from prompt to code) was made.