I wonder what the legal implications of them using SciHub and Libgen would be if that's true. I'd imagine OpenAI is big enough to make deals with publishers.
Even if bits and pieces of the book text are distributed across the internet and you end up picking up portions of the book, you still read the book.
It is extremely sad but ChatGPT will be taken down by the end of this year and replaced by a highly neutered model next year.
But I think that unless GPT starts reciting large parts outside of the context of learning/education/research, reciting smaller snippets would fall into "fair use" and not be illegal.
Especially with ChatGPT you can probe the model by asking certain questions about the material at hand to see if it has seen the entire book.
Also you don’t have to be able to recite the book verbatim for it to have been in your training set. The snippets I am referring to are on the side of the training data
You can't steal a book, photocopy some pages, then claim the photocopied pages are fair use.
It's, however, very interesting to see if they fund efforts to massively (re)start books digitalisation.