Any digital object can be represented as a list of numbers (this is precisely the origin of the term digital). Since there is clearly precedent for copyrighted digital objects (media, software, etc), reducing something to "a list of numbers" is not a useful distinction in regard to copyright law.
Model weight are akin to markov chains and compressed data. They are direct representations of the data they where created from in the same way that markov chains are created from hidden markov chains and Zipped files are created from files.
Zipping a file does not grant the copyright protection of the zipped output beyond the copyright of the original file.
If you take some copyrighted data, a set of books, for example. And count words in these books and then plot a distribution of top 100 word frequencies. The copyright for that new image would belong to you.
Exactly. Data is not covered by American copyright and artifacts generated by LLM and diffusion tools are not covered by copyright protection unless there was human involvement and humans are transparent about how they participated in the creation of the artifacts.
For now there is a lot of human involvement. You pretty much need a team of engineers or an equivalent to get anything besides minor fine tuning done. And there is usually human labor involved at labeling, feedback and evaluation stages.
The issue circles back to their needing to be transparent about how they did the work.
When it comes to intellectual property there are two methods of protecting it: either you can keep it a trade secret and only use it in house (the secret sauce approach) or you keep things out in the open and seek copyright or patent or trademark protection. You can't have it both ways and even more so with AI co-created artifacts. If they are transparent about all the steps involved and what the humans did then they can seek protection for the human created parts. This also allows others to then replicate these steps and to create similar artifacts.
It sounds like they and many other "AI" teams want patent protection without having to register for it. These teams are trying to write their own licenses to rights they do not have.
Any digital object can be represented as a list of numbers (this is precisely the origin of the term digital). Since there is clearly precedent for copyrighted digital objects (media, software, etc), reducing something to "a list of numbers" is not a useful distinction in regard to copyright law.