Yes, the person to whom you are responding appears to be mixing up "publicly available" (made available to general public) with "public domain" (not protected by copyright).
IANAL but, I think, as far as US law goes, they have the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. Unsupervised training is an automated process, and the US Copyright Office has said [0] that the product of automated processes can't be copyrighted. While that statement was focused on the output of running an AI model, not the output of its training process (the parameters), I can't see how – for a model produced by unsupervised training – the conclusion would be any different.
This is probably not the case in many non-US jurisdictions, such as the EU, UK, Australia, etc – all of which have far weaker standards for copyrightability than the US does. It may not apply for supervised training – the supervision may be sufficient human input for copyrightability even in the US. It may not apply for AI models trained from copyrighted datasets, where the copyright owner of the dataset is claiming ownership of the model – that is not the case for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc, who are all using training datasets predominantly copyright by third parties, but maybe Getty Images will build their own Stable Diffusion-style AI based on their image library, and that might give them a way of copyrighting their model which OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc lack.
It is always possible that US Congress will amend the law to make AI parameters copyrightable, or introduce some sui generis non-copyright legal protection for them, like the semiconductor mask work rights which were legislated in response to court rulings that semiconductor masks could not be copyrighted. I think the odds are reasonably high they will in fact do that sooner or later, but nobody knows for certain how things will pan out.
> the product of automated processes can't be copyrighted.
That output could still be covered by copyright: In the case where the input is covered by copyright, the product/output may be considered a derived work, in which case the output is still covered by the same copyright the input was. Your argument just explains why the output will not gain any additional copyright coverage.
IANAL but, I think, as far as US law goes, they have the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. Unsupervised training is an automated process, and the US Copyright Office has said [0] that the product of automated processes can't be copyrighted. While that statement was focused on the output of running an AI model, not the output of its training process (the parameters), I can't see how – for a model produced by unsupervised training – the conclusion would be any different.
This is probably not the case in many non-US jurisdictions, such as the EU, UK, Australia, etc – all of which have far weaker standards for copyrightability than the US does. It may not apply for supervised training – the supervision may be sufficient human input for copyrightability even in the US. It may not apply for AI models trained from copyrighted datasets, where the copyright owner of the dataset is claiming ownership of the model – that is not the case for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc, who are all using training datasets predominantly copyright by third parties, but maybe Getty Images will build their own Stable Diffusion-style AI based on their image library, and that might give them a way of copyrighting their model which OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc lack.
It is always possible that US Congress will amend the law to make AI parameters copyrightable, or introduce some sui generis non-copyright legal protection for them, like the semiconductor mask work rights which were legislated in response to court rulings that semiconductor masks could not be copyrighted. I think the odds are reasonably high they will in fact do that sooner or later, but nobody knows for certain how things will pan out.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...