You took that quote out of context and missed the broader point in the process. The snippets provided in regular search results cannot generally replace the substance of the full articles they link to, while that's the whole
point of GP's hypothetical website—it simply doesn't reproduce large chunks of text verbatim, presumably to avoid copyright infringement claims in the hypothetical's frame, and in GP's rhetorical frame to present an analogy with the information-laundering powers of LLMs that their creators claim make their exploitation of unlicensed training data fair use.
The whole point of a search engine (as we've classically known them) is to index the web and respond to queries with a list of links that you will inspect and click through on. The whole point of an LLM chatbot tool is to eliminate those inspecting and clicking-through steps, becoming a one-stop shop for content whose substance was created by someone else. That's also the whole point of GP's hypothetical, which is why it works as an analogy.
---
There are substantially better arguments for search engines being legitimate fair use. Consider, for example, transformation. AI defenders will argue that these systems are transformative because they reshuffle elements of their input in their output, but that's clearly a much weaker form of transformation than one in which the transformed work has an entirely different nature and purpose, i.e. search engines vs. the results they return. Ultimately these technicality-based "nuh uh" arguments aren't going to save the practice of training AI on unlicensed data, because they are incompatible with the spirit of copyright law even if the novel nature of these technologies means the letter of said law can't quite nail them down yet.
If these arguments do succeed, it will be because the judicial/regulatory environment in which they were applied has been corrupted by capital.
