By that definition, so is all human output. Musicians spend years studying and practicing other people's music before writing their own, painters spend years trying to replicate techniques before mastering their own, programmers spend years reading other people's bugs before authoring their own. All expression of skill is ultimately derivative. Sometimes slightly, sometimes verbatim, sometimes outright plagiarism.
This is why we reserve "derivative" for cases where the output has a similarities and obvious connection, and why we have a hard time dealing with it in practice - it's impossible to disallow a human from using past experiences in future works.
We taught a pile of melted sand to think using principles of learning (very roughly) similar to ours, and now we get upset that it worked and they apply what they learnt because now only we are allowed to do that.
By that definition, so is all human output. Musicians spend years studying and practicing other people's music before writing their own, painters spend years trying to replicate techniques before mastering their own, programmers spend years reading other people's bugs before authoring their own. All expression of skill is ultimately derivative. Sometimes slightly, sometimes verbatim, sometimes outright plagiarism.
This is why we reserve "derivative" for cases where the output has a similarities and obvious connection, and why we have a hard time dealing with it in practice - it's impossible to disallow a human from using past experiences in future works.
We taught a pile of melted sand to think using principles of learning (very roughly) similar to ours, and now we get upset that it worked and they apply what they learnt because now only we are allowed to do that.