It could be a little more subtle than that, and legal slight of hand. All the work is original and copyrightable, because someone wrote it. But does the NYT con

It could be a little more subtle than that, and legal slight of hand. All the work is original and copyrightable, because someone wrote it. But does the NYT control that copyright? Or has the NYT violated someone else's copyright, in exactly the same way OpenAI does? And if OpenAI can demonstrate that some of the work NYT is claiming copyright on is not in fact copyrightable by the NYT, then they might be able to get the whole case tossed. It would be even more fun if the NYT was found to be claiming copyright on work produced by OpenAI's software.