The entity which owns ChatGPT is apparently maintaining a copy of the entirety of the New York Times archive within the ChatGPT knowledge base. That they extract some fair use snippets (they would claim) from it would still be fruit of a poisoned tree, no?
(disclaimer: I'm pro AI, anti copyright, especially anti elitist NY Times; but pro rule of law)
This can be further coupled with search - use GPT to look at multiple sources at once, and report. It's what humans do as well, we read the same news in different sources to get a more balanced take. Maybe they have contradictions, maybe they have inaccuracies, biases. We could keep that analysis for training models. This would also improve the training set.
Your creative work does deserve at least some period of exclusive rights for you. Definitely not so much that your grandchildren get to quibble about it well into retirement. But also whatever the number 3 or 4 most valuable company in the world doesn’t get to scrape your content daily to repackage and sell as intelligent systems.
Here's a thing though: for 99%+ of that content, being turned into feedstock for ML model training is about the only valuable thing that came of its existence.
If it were not for world-ending danger of too smart an AI being developed too quickly, I'd vote for exempting ML training from copyright altogether, today - it's hard to overstate just how much more useful any copyrighted content is for society as LLM training data, than as whatever it was created for originally.
