It's an interesting legal question. US copyright is based around expressiveness and originality (which is why phone books and IBM's logo are not copyright protected.)
An argument might be made that the curation of data that goes into the training set qualifies, but it might depend on how much expressiveness and originality went into the curation.
For example, I could see a court ruling that the weights for a model trained on "all the good music from the 70s" is copyrightable, as someone had to express what they believed was "good" music, but a model trained on a large percentage of the internet without much curation would not.
Of course, nobody really knows until the courts weigh-in on it.
An argument might be made that the curation of data that goes into the training set qualifies, but it might depend on how much expressiveness and originality went into the curation.
For example, I could see a court ruling that the weights for a model trained on "all the good music from the 70s" is copyrightable, as someone had to express what they believed was "good" music, but a model trained on a large percentage of the internet without much curation would not.
Of course, nobody really knows until the courts weigh-in on it.