I’m really confused about how anybody thinks they can “license” these models. They’re obviously not works of authorship.
I’m confused why you’re confused, if I write a computer program that generates an artifact that is useful to other people, obviously the artifact should be considered a part of the program itself, and therefore subject to licensing just like the generating program. If I write a program to procedurally generate interesting minecraft maps, should I not be able to license the maps, just because there’s one extra step of authorship between me and them?
If it generates them totally at random, then no. They have no author. But even in that case, if you do it in a traditional way you will at least have personally made more decisions about what the output looks like than somebody who trains a model. The whole point of deep learning is that you don’t make decisions about the weights themselves. There’s no “I’ll put a 4 here” step.
I’m confused why you’re confused, if I write a computer program that generates an artifact that is useful to other people, obviously the artifact should be considered a part of the program itself, and therefore subject to licensing just like the generating program. If I write a program to procedurally generate interesting minecraft maps, should I not be able to license the maps, just because there’s one extra step of authorship between me and them?
If it generates them totally at random, then no. They have no author. But even in that case, if you do it in a traditional way you will at least have personally made more decisions about what the output looks like than somebody who trains a model. The whole point of deep learning is that you don’t make decisions about the weights themselves. There’s no “I’ll put a 4 here” step.