There's the descriptive question over whether something is a copyright violation today and there's the prescriptive question over what kind of policies we'd like. Does anyone with more intimate knowledge of this area of law care to comment?
OpenAI doesn't seem to do anything different than Google. They can own a private library of copyrighted works and index/model it how ever they choose. They can offer products on that index/model in creative ways. And AFAICT, they don't distribute the index/model nor the raw training set to others.
Now artists may not like it, and we as a society may not like it, but it looks like they're not doing anything illegal. And to be fair, a court would have to slice the baby super thin here to allow Google to do their indexing, but not OpenAI.
Yes. Oodles of lawsuits claiming as such https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-lawsuit-copyrighted-d....
But yes the crux of it is financial and not algorithmic. Google ALSO uses AI. If google took sentences from 2 different web pages and stitched them together to form a paragraph, is that AI or search? [see google BERT]. What if they stitched together 3000 word-parts? What if they took sentences from 15 web pages, ranked them, and that's your view? See, it's all the same thing. openAI stitches together word-parts, by comparison.
Now when I say it's financial, when said information is presented, google gladly gives a hit to the site +/- add revenue if present. openAI does not do this. If openAI figured out how to do this then we'd be cooking with some gas.
Google arbitrarily chooses which sites to show on the search page, which may have nothing to do with relevance of the actual topic being searched. Only certain sites which google thinks should be at the top are at the top.
If google decides to blacklist you for whatever reason... well tough.