> Proving the opposite; one cannot take a .wav file, convert it to an .mp3 and claim that because the representations are totally different the "new work" doesn't violate the original.

But let's talk about what is different.

It is not a copyright infringement I go to Disney's website, download a JPEG, convert that JPEG to 1s and 0s, print just a bunch of 1s and 0s and not the image and not ascii art of the image, just like a printing press made up of just [1] and [0] character blocks, and sell that. Yes, the 1s and 0s are mathematically derived from the image but the image of 1s and 0s is not a visual derivative of the Disney image. That is, no one is going to buy a t-shirt of 1s and 0s instead of a Mickey t-shirt. Anyone can go to the Disney website and get those same 1s and 0s.

This is different than the case where you're talking about a .wav and an .mp3, right?

> Trying to move the argument to a higher level, I believe this legal argument will ultimately be solved by a technical matter about noise.

> Everyone talks about the training data. Nobody talks about the noise. But that is the KEY (literally).

> Because there is nothing non-deterministic going on, but each run seems to create something "new" a clearer interpretation of the system-signal relation is needed. With exactly the same initial conditions we can treat the seed noise as a decryption key. The law will very probably eventually settle on an interpretation of large models as an encoding mechanism whose seed noise is the other half of a pair, which together constitute a transformation/transcoding of the original source material.

This is much more interesting than just copyright as this has to do with authorship itself!

The combination of the seed and the text inputs in either ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion result in a deterministic output. This means that these are facts. Who owns the output of a seed of "1" and a text input of "astronaut riding a horse"? Who owns what is able to be seen at a certain slice of the sky?

Someone could still be found to be infringing on copyrights when they slap certain things on t-shirts that happen to have a deterministic seed and prompt, but copyright is a separate concern from authorship.

If someone took a picture of a certain stellar formation somewhere that looked sort of like a cartoon head and then they put a little cartoon speech bubble and made an illustrated novel based on such characters... and then if I take my own pictures of those same stellar formations and I publish a book of astrophotograph... or then if I make my own illustrated novel with different characters but using the same stellar formations... or then however close that line can currently be toed with photographs of stellar formations is where we must be with photographs of seed/prompt formations.

> The onus is going to fall on the creator to show how their "creative process" is substantially different from transcoding a jpeg to a png through a set of filters to obscure the source.

I'm not familiar with any legal doctrine that follows this logic so I think any lawyers are going to have their defendants focus on establishing useful interpretations of their actions for the court.