No it's not, it's pure greed. Everyone'd think it absurd if copyright holders dared to demand that any human who reads their publicly available text has to pay them a fee, but just because OpenAI are training a brain made of silicon instead of a brain made of carbon all the rent-seekers come out to try to take advantage.
Copyright is an ancient system that is a poor legal framework for the modern world, IMO. I don't think it should exist at all. Of course as a rightsholder you are free to disagree.
If we can learn and recite information, and a robot can too, then we should have the same rules.
It's not like ChatGPT is going around writing its own copycat articles and publishing them in newsstands. If it's good at memorizing and regurgitating NYT articles on request, so what? Google can do that too, and so can a human who spends time memorizing them. That's not its intent or usefulness. What's amazing is that it can combine that with other information and synthesize novel analysis.
The NYT is desperate (understandably). Journalism is a hard hard field with no money. But I'd much rather lose them than OpenAI. Of course copyright law isn't up to me, but if it were, I'd dissolve it altogether.
Open AI is a business. NYT is a business. MS is a business. Neither will be happy when some other party takes something away from them without paying.
I saw an article the other day where they banned ByteDance's account for using their product to build their own, can you see the absolutely massive hypocrisy here?
It's fine for OpenAI to steal work, but if someone wants to steal theirs, it's not? I cannot believe people even try defend this shit. It's wack.
And Altman (Mr. Worldcoin) and fucking Microsoft are what, some gracious angels building chatbots for the betterment of humanity? How is them stealing as much content as they can get away with not greedy, exactly?