The answer is no, because you reading the article didn’t dramatically degrade its market value.
An AI ingesting all content on the internet and then being ultra-effective at frontrunning that content for a large number of future readers does degrade its market value (and subsumes it into the model’s value).
Legal judgments generally focus on actual impacts rather than quirks that might exist in hypothetical universes.
If your pool of people that can learn about topic X is restricted the outputs or their labor are more expensive. Now lift a continent of billions of people out of poverty, get them access to schooling, safety etc and see the market forces do the rest.
Now equate ChatGPT et al with said billion people. Just that it runs on electricity. If quality is good enough of course. Which is hard to decide right now because of hype.
How about if you read a news article to write a competing one rewording and possibly citing it (one of the most common practices in news)?
The most obvious parallel to me is YouTube. There are a ton of people ingesting books, then transforming that information into a roughly paraphrased video for people to watch for free (ish). That devalues the books they read and paraphrased, because other people don't need to read them.
Spark Notes devalue actual books in a way, because a lot of high schoolers read those instead of buying the actual book.
Search engines have also supplanted books in large part, because I don't need a whole book to answer a specific question. I don't know anyone that owns an encyclopedia anymore.
This is the next iteration of these processes. Non-novel information's market value has been degrading for decades now. A series of questions that would have cost thousands of dollars in books to answer in the 70's/80's is now free, with or without AI.
For that same exact reason, it’s totally reasonable they’re attracting unique amounts of negative attention too.
You can’t have it both ways: yes LLMs are going to change information retrieval the way nothing else has before, but no it’s actually just like all the other things in terms of their impact on incentive structures.
FWIW I don’t really know where I land on this issue. I just find it totally incoherent to believe in the bull case of “this will transform everything” while also portraying it all as par for the course when discussing potential negatives.
Just because Spark Notes didn’t obviously manage to kill valuable parts of our information ecosystem and economy does not mean that Spark Notes x 10,000,000 will not.