No, this is not a post about Sam Altman being ousted by Open AI (even though at this very moment the final outcome is unclear).  This post is about how another AI company was sued by music publishers, seeking to enjoin the use of copywritten words and music employed by AI to train its LLMs (large-language models).

When asked by users to write a poem in the style of a given writer, the program combined lyrics from songs from two different singing groups; the AI company neither asked permission for use nor gave credit to the artists. Can style plus phrases violate copyright?

These kinds of suits, filed in Federal court, are testing the degree of protection from using all types of intellectual property which is subject to copyright protection.  The LLMs plug in parts of protected works, and are following programming orders to use the information they absorbed from billions of scanned data points. [The AI company involved in this particular litigation had installed protections against certain  data use (no medical or legal advice, no support of illegal activities), but no guardrails re use of music to compose.]

As AI absorbs words, ideas and images from huge data bases, using those pieces to create new “works” from parts contained in the “original,” how close must a “copy” be in order to offend legal protections?   Does it matter that there is no specific intent to steal, since the product is created by a programmed device which pools everything? What sort of swimming lanes will courts or the Copyright Office mandate?  Is copying a “style” prohibited?  How to deal with “mash-ups” where fragments from different works are combined, yet fan-identifiable by viewers, readers or listeners?

When the U.S. Copyright Office asked for comments on what sort of  AI guard-rails should be imposed, it received 10,000 responses.  I wonder if the government is using artificial intelligence to digest all that data?  I wonder if those artificial intelligence programs will skew the comments in acts of self-protection?