Telegraph: “The maker of ChatGPT has warned that a ban on using news and books to train chatbots would doom the development of artificial intelligence. OpenAI has told peers that it would be “impossible” to create services such as ChatGPT if it were prevented from relying on copyrighted works, as it seeks to influence potential laws on the topic. It comes as the company, which is reportedly in investment talks that could value it at $100bn (£79bn), prepares to fight lawsuits from book publishers and the New York Times over claims that it has illegally used their content to “train” ChatGPT. In evidence submitted to the House of Lords communications and digital committee, OpenAI said: “Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials…”

See also Futurism: “OpenAI Says It’s Fine to Vacuum Up Everyone’s Content and Charge for It Without Paying Them. Late last year, the New York Times became the first major US newspaper to sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the Sam Altman-led company had made unauthorized use of its published work to train its large language models. The lawsuit showed that ChatGPT could easily be used to extensively regurgitate paywalled content almost word for word, an arguably glaring example of a company benefiting from the NYT‘s work without express permission by charging its users a monthly fee. Now, just under two weeks later, OpenAI published a 1,000-word blog post in response to the lawsuit, arguing that it should have unfettered rights to train its models on the newspaper’s work, and that such a practice is considered fair use under US copyright law — a particularly hot-button subject that has yet to be debated in court. It’s a heated challenge that could have considerable implications for the future of journalism. By allowing users to skirt around paywalls and subscriptions, OpenAI is directly undercutting an important revenue source for news outlets around the world. And that doesn’t bode well, considering the sorry state of the industry in the year 2024…”