The model producing copyrighted material isn't as great an argument as people seem to think. The cases are pursuing training as infringement, not usage. So in

The model producing copyrighted material isn't as great an argument as people seem to think. The cases are pursuing training as infringement, not usage. So in the case of Mario - there's no infringing in learning the attributes of the most recognizable Italian plumber in video games. It is only when the models create images of Mario in their usage that's infringing (which will be separate cases and those will likely be a shoe-in for plaintiffs forcing copyright tagging filters in front of publicly accessible generative models). The most damning part is the reproductions of the NYT text, as that's not simply learning attributes of a copyrighted character, but verbatim partial duplication. I suspect in many of those cases it's due to fair use copying of segments of NYT articles by multiple other sources in the training data, but it's going to be difficult waters for the defense to navigate even if that's the case - but this is also technically impossible for any trained LLM to avoid. If a source you have rights to quotes a source you don't have rights to, you are going to ingest a legally permissible usage of material that suddenly will no longer be legally permissible to have ingested? We'll see how it plays out, but it really seems like it's just going to come down to a drawn out appeals battle no matter how it lands given different judges are likely going to each ultimately see it differently given both sides have potentially compelling arguments.