These lawsuits could end up being a nightmare for AI companies if the plaintiffs are successful. One can’t easily just remove the content from a model like you can from a website if someone sends you a takedown notice. The content is deeply embedded inside the mathematical relationships within the model. You’d basically have to retrain the whole model again sans the offending data. Given the cost to retrain just a few successful claims would destroy any business built around making money off these models.
The times appears to have a strong case here with their complaint showing long verbatim passages being produced by ChatGPT that go far beyond any reasonable claim of fair use. This will be an interesting case to watch that could shape the whole Generative AI space.