The trick here is that OpenAI might win and won’t be liable for plagiarizing the NYT (or my own GitHub repo, as I observed with GPT-3.5). But if YOU ask ChatGPT for something about American politics for your blog, and it gives you a paragraph from the NYT, then YOU are responsible for the copyright infringement. Even though you of course had no clue it was plagiarized.

I do not think this is at all likely to happen with newer LLMs, but when GPT-3.5 spat out hundreds of lines of my own F#, verbatim, it certainly convinced me that this tech is too skeezy and unethical for me to use. I really don’t like the idea of playing Plagiarism Roulette.