Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy

Even “mechanical” transformation by humans does not create a work (as defined by UrhG, i.e. copyright). It has to have some creativity.

Until then, it’s a transformation of the original work(s) and therefore bound to the (sum of their) terms and conditions on the original work.

If you have a copyrighted thing, you can print it out, scan it, compress it as JPEG, store it into a database… it’s still just a transformation of the original work, and you can retrieve a sufficiently substantial part of the original work from it.

The article where someone reimplemented a (slightly older version of) ChatGPT in a 498-line PostgreSQL query showed exactly and easily understandable how this is just a lossy compression/decompression: https://explainextended.com/2023/12/31/happy-new-year-15/

There are now feasible attacks obtaining “training data” from prod models in large scale, e.g: https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-training-data-from-chatgpt.html

This is sufficient to prove that these “models” are just databases with lossily compressed, but easily enough accessible, copies of the original, possibly (probably!) copyrighted, works.

Another thing I would like to point out is the relative weight. For a work which I offer to the public under a permissive licence, attribution is basically the only remuneration I can ever get. This means failure to attribute so has a much higher weight than for differently licenced or unlicenced stuff.