Position: No Retroactive Cure for Infringement during Training
As generative AI faces intensifying legal challenges, the machine learning community has increasingly relied on post-hoc mitigation -- especially machine unlearning and inference-time guardrails -- to argue for compliance. This paper argues that such post-hoc mitigation methods cannot retroactively cure liability from unlawful acquisition and training, because compliance hinges on data lineage, not the outputs. Our argument has three parts. First, unauthorized copying/ingestion can be a legally complete completed act, and model weights may operate as fixed copies that retain training-derived expressive value, making later filtering beside the point for infringement. Second, contract and t...
| Authors | Satoru Utsunomiya, Masaru Isonuma, Junichiro Mori et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 20 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 April 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.