Anyone offering opinions on whether AI reconstruction of text from a bunch of statistical weights is a violation of copyright, should first write an essay explaining their thinking in the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance affair

This has all been argued before in different contexts with different facts, but it has all been argued before:

“Will Marty Abegg Ever Find a Job?” | The BAS Library

Each word in the fragments had its own three-by-five card, noting where it appeared and what the adjacent words were. But the concordance was available only to the eight scholars on the publication team, not to outsiders.


In 1988 copies of this concordance were privately printed from the three-by-five cards for the use of the then-dispersed publication team, and a copy eventually found its way to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio.

With the aid of this concordance, a graduate student named Marty Abegg was able to reconstruct the transcripts. And he eventually allowed his reconstructions to be published by the Biblical Archaeology Society.

https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/article/will-marty-abegg-ever-find-a-job/

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