>>A top concern for The Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the o

>>A top concern for The Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff. This seems to me to be completely standard in the newspaper industry. Many times every week, I see stories in the form "The [Major_News_Outlet] reports that [Event_X occurred] or [their investigation revealed Y] and here are the details [...]. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. If you write a history of Issac Newton or the invention of semiconductors, I cannot copy that wholesale and sell it as mine, but nothing prevents me writing my own version, even using the same facts and citing your work. I'm quite sure that I could provide a service where a bunch of workers read NYT articles and write brief summaries. I'm not sure they would even need citations, as long as we don't copy chunks wholesale. If OpenAI is simply parroting the words of the NYT articles without Fair Use constraints (short blurbs), it seems they have a problem. If they are fully re-writing them into short non-copying summaries, it seems the NYT has a problem. It'll be interesting to see how the courts sort this out.