> You cannot claim that a formulaic thesaurusing of a text is parody, not unless the process is related to the message of the original text itself. Even then, that's a dubious claim. Especially if it was done automatically.

Oh even if it's not a parody it would look transformed enough that a first-time reader would be getting a completely different interpretation of the story* compared to the original source. And that's all that matters.

> There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.

Wrong. Weights, which these models comprise of, are literally numbers to an extensive mathematical equation.

> It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying.

And no one knows/there is no consensus on what a 'fuzzy way of copying' is. It is either copying or it is not. You could say that training an LLM is abstracting and integrating various text into it's weights, hereby transforming the source material and again transforming it a second time via integrating it into its weights.

> So would the model work if it only trained on the top 10% of pixels in every image? Or do they in fact need the entire image before they begin processing it, and therefore use the entire image?

The model works by training on what features humans can make sense out of the image they're presented with, if the image and the observations of the image's feature were clear/observable enough. Then the generation makes use of those observations. I'm just using 10% as an arbitrary number to describe proportions. If the generation were 100% of the observations from the same image, the model would be overfitting, and many would have deemed it to have produced a copy.

> Just because a race car uses kinetic energy, gravity, and friction to propel itself, the same way a human does, doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as a human.

WTF does this even mean? A race car uses concepts from Newton, just as how a human uses gravity to train it's muscles to move be it knowingly or unknowingly. But you don't see them (car makers/humans) paying rent to Newton after he discovered gravity. Come on!

These are my opinions ofc.

> Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word?

If you meant it literally.. I'd think that such a version would be a sort of parody. It'd be up to lawyers doing their cross-examinations to prove the work was intended for such a purpose though..

> Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.

Probably a lawyer would answer this better than me, but the 'content' is the same and would violate copyright. There's also other factors, like if it was translated/distributed for free.

Besides that I regard that LLMs to hold mathematical observations in contrast to a translated work. So long as the user ensures the output isn't close to what's already available imo it fits the transformative criteria.

> the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and

> All of it, from everyone.

Yea I'd like to see how drawing two circles violates the copyright of drawing one circle!

By the same 'transformative' standards that allow satire, reaction and commentary videos to exist. And those take 100% from the source and add context, whereas good generated AI images that aren't wholesale copying take like less than 10% from the original source.

In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on *your observation* of someone else's work is absurd. No one pays Newton's descendants for making lifts or hosting bungee jump sport activities.