This is largely how it works for nearly all coprightable work. I can draw Mickey Mouse but legally I'm not doing anything wrong until I try to sell it. It certainly doesn't put Crayola or Adobe at legal risk for me to do so.

But you are not the one drawing Mickey Mouse in this scenario, are you? You are instructing the AI company to draw something or more close to the original post you are prompting to generate lyrics for song X.

Your prompt may be asking something for illegal (i.e. reproducing the lyrics), but the one reproducing the lyrics is the AI company, not you yourself.

In your example you are asking Adobe to draw Mickey Mouse and Adobe happily draws a perfect rendition of Mickey Mouse for you and you have to pay Adobe for that image.

This keeps coming up, and I am not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell none of that matters. I can pay someone to draw Mickey Mouse for me and hang it up in my house. If I invite people to visit my Mickey Mouse House and charge them for the privilege, I'm in violation. Maybe the artist I paid to draw the mouse is also in some smaller violation but it all comes back to distribution and impact. I don't think it devalues Mickey Mouse in any way if I have a slot machine that spits out pictures of Mickey Mouse. If it does devalue it, maybe it doesn't have much value to begin with.

Reproduction (again, IANAL) seems to consist of a lot more than "I made it", it consists of how you use it and whether that usage constitutes infringement.

EDIT: To add, genuine question, what does "asking" come down to? I can ask Photoshop to draw Mickey Mouse through a series of clever Mickey-Mouse-shaped brush strokes. I can ask Microsoft Word to reproduce lyrics by typing them in. At what gradient between those actions and text prompting am I (or OpenAI, or Adobe) committing copyright infringement?

Now I get where you are coming from (also not a lawyer):

- You asking the painter to create a Mickey Mouse painting: not illegal. You still are asking for a derivative work without permission, but if used privately you're good (this is different per jurisdiction) - The artist creating the painting of a derivative work is acting illegally - they are selling you the picture and hence this is a commercial act and trademark infringement - Displaying the bought Mickey Mouse image publicly is likely infringement, but worse is if you would charge admission to show the picture, that would definitely be illegal - If you were to hide the image in your basement and look at it privately, it would most likely not be illegal (private use - but see first point since this is different per jurisdiction)

Comparing violations doesn't really make sense (the artist creating it vs. you displaying it) - the act of creating the image for money is illegal. If it were the artist creating the image for him/herself - that would be fine.

Now getting back to the LLM and your question which also the court answered (jurisdiction: Germany). The courts opinion is that the AI recreating these lyrics by itself is illegal (think about the artist creating the image for you for money).

Personally I would think the key part and similarity is the payment. You pay for using OpenAI. You pay for it creating those lyrics/texts. In my head I can create a similar reasoning to your Mickey Mouse example. If we'd take open source LLMs and THEY would create perfect lyrics, I think the court would have a much harder case to make. Who would you be suing and for what kind of money? It would all be open source and nobody is paying anyone anything to recreate the lyrics. It would be and is very hard to prove that the LLMs were trained on copyrighted material - in the lyrics example, they may have ingested illegal lyrics-sharing sites, but they may also just have ingested Twitter or Reddit where people talk about the lyrics - how could any LLM know that these contents were illegal or not to be ingested.

Not really, if I ask an artist to draw me a Mickey Mouse (for money) who is committing copyright infringement?

It's an interesting observation that the big AI corps very much argue that learning "is the same that humans do", so fair use. But then when it comes to using that learning they argue the other way, i.e. "this is just a machine, it's the person asking who is doing the infringement".

Companies care about material damages in practice. I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that in that case, the artist drawing and selling the work is infringing (to a degree, because this seems to be a case Disney et al doesn't care about) but that if you take their work and publish and promote it and sell it, YOU become Disney's problem. If the wind and rain and erosion and time and God managed to produce a perfect post-Steamboat-Willie Mickey Mouse in the desert sand, visible from space, that wouldn't be infringement until you monetized it, called it Mickey Mouse and charged people to see it. A lot of the entities trying to get their piece of Infringement Pie seem to think their authority and their works are in the first position here instead; that my newfound capability to generate a Mickey Mouse from scratch on a whim affects their pockets, when in fact we're back to a variant of the classic piracy argument - I was not ever going to pay for it under any condition. If I decide this weekend to have one of the robots help me publish To Kill a Mockingbird Part 2, then sue me into the ground.