No, just the question whether machines can hold copyright is decisively shut and closed, until the laws are changed. Many other questions are debated.

Always fun to see the „AI is special, no rules apply“ crowd.

> the question whether machines can hold copyright is decisively shut and closed

That's just a small part of the question. Some of the questions we still need answers for are:

1) If ChatGPT produces an answer that is very similar to something it was trained on, can you use that answer? Or do you need a license from the original author? If you do need a license, how do you figure out if an answer is close enough to some original work to require a license? How much effort can we expect a user of an LLM to put into searching for original sources? If you can't identify sources, can you use an LLM at all?

2) Is it even allowed to train an LLM on data without asking for permission?

3) Is prompting an LLM a creative act? Is ChatGPT just a tool like a typewriter? If you type a poem on a typewriter, no sane person would consider the typewriter the copyright holder. So shouldn't we consider the person prompting the LLM the author?

Those questions are all interesting in themselves, but utterly irrelevant here.

The first one asks if someone else than the „prompter“ should have copyright.

The second one asks about other people‘s copyright.

The third one is answered by case law, including the Monkey Selfie case. The wildlife photography setup is very much comparable to your typewriter there.

If there's a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters, and they all write a single page to a thousand-page epic, is the scientist allowed to copyright and sell it as a book?

In the US, absolutely. The scientist set up the conditions and curated the output, and animals have no creative copyright privileges of their own.

You're losing the plot and contradicting yourself across your comments.

What exactly is the thesis you are trying to argue?

The wildlife photography setup had no human intervention when the photo was created since the monkey took the selfie.

In this case TinyLetter was "written" by GPT4o with a LOT of prompting. Have you even read it? https://github.com/i365dev/LetterDrop/blob/main/docs/CDDR/ap...

As always, some random person in a tech forum thinks they have all the answers to non-trivial legal questions...

I mean, we haven't even talked about jurisdiction issues yet. US case law does not apply globally.

LetterDrop, not TinyLetter!

My bad.

If you think too hard about it it becomes pretty clear AI just breaks the already tenuous justifications for copyright.