If they could find a single person who in natural use (e.g. not as they were trying to gather data for this lawsuit) has ever actually used ChatGPT as a direct substitution for a NYT subscription, I'd support this lawsuit.

But nobody would do that, because ChatGPT is a really shitty way to read NYT articles (it's stale, it can't reliably reproduce them, etc.). All that is valuable about it is the way that it transforms and operates on that data in conjunction with all the other data that it has.

The real world use of ChatGPT is very transformative, even if you can trick it into behaving in ways that are not. If the courts act intelligently they should at least weigh that as part of their decision.

> Well yeah, copying a work and using it for its original expressive purpose isn’t fair use, no? You have to use it for a transformative purpose.

To be clear, whether the use of the original work is transformative is one key consideration within one of the four prongs of fair use. The prong "purpose and character of the use" can be fulfilled by other conditions [1]. For example, using the original work within a classroom for education purposes is not transformative, but can fulfill the same "purpose and character of the use" prong. Whether the use is for profit and to which extent are other considerations within that prong. A profit purpose doesn't automatically fail the purpose prong, and a non-profit purpose doesn't automatically pass the purpose prong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#1._Purpose_and_charac...

> Well yeah, copying a work and using it for its original expressive purpose isn’t fair use, no? You have to use it for a transformative purpose.

They transformed the weights.

Just like reading the article transforms yours.

As for verbatim reproduction, I'm pretty sure brains are capable of reproducing song lyrics, musical melodies, common symbols ("cool S"), and lots of other things verbatim too.

Those quotes from Dr. King's speech that you remember are copyrighted, you know?