I’m pretty sure LLMs have exactly reproduced copyrighted passages.
If I asked you to recite a popular poem, nursery rhyme, a song, or book passage there’s a good chance you could. Everyone can recite things word for word.
It’s the same with LLM’s, if they’re asked to generate, for example, an article written by the New York Post about a specific topic they really did write about, then it’s similar to asking someone to recite a poem or song.
Yes, literally every single person on this planet can recite a song or poem.
But there are naturally massive differences between a human brain and an LLM. The point I was making is that an LLM doesn’t copy and store books and articles wholesale. The ability to reproduce samples from the dataset is more of a quirk than a feature, in the same way that a person can memorize things.