I'm pretty sure I can count the number of words in Harry Potter without breaking copyright law.

It is absolutely not clear when statistical models stops counting ngrams and starts making a derived works.

You can also read the HP series and write summaries and reviews about each book as wodenokoto. You can probably create HP looking artwork and write stories that could fit into the HP universe. You can't call any of your work HP. This sounds obvious, but if it's done by a machine then some people think it's a different question.

I can write code to get a list of characters in the book, get their page numbers analysed and draw graphs to help me create my own version. Am I breaking copyright laws? Most likely not.

It's a truly grey area which lawmakers never saw coming.

I believe if events unfold well we'll see and treat AI tools to be like sharp knives eventually. It will be up to the user what they do with it.

>You can also read the HP series and write summaries and reviews about each book as wodenokoto. You can probably create HP looking artwork and write stories that could fit into the HP universe

IIRC there have been lawsuits about exactly that. A person wrote (and published) some fandom in the Harry Potter universe (without Harry Potter in it IIRC), he lost the case I believe. This is similar to the fact that you cannot make your own comic books with Mickey Mouse (unless your operation is small enough that it flies under the radar), the universe/characters are in fact copyrighted.

Probably they used too much reference, I wasn't implying that the universe itself is not protected. But writing something similar that would appeal the fans should be okay.

Alright, then every piece of music you've ever heard is also a derived work. Unless the composer grew up in a void.

I think you're trying to be ridiculous, but lawsuits of that sort do come up periodically - accusations of composition theft that in practice are probably not theft and just the fact that there aren't THAT many unique note progressions you can put into a song, and it's not that odd for a composer to accidentally imitate something they heard a long time ago when picking one.

How does AI change the playing field here? Accidental infringement is a thing either way, and the creator should be careful to avoid accidental infringement regardless of whether they're using an AI to do the creation.