In addition to the possible business threat, forcing OpenAI to identify its use of copyrighted data would expose the company to potential lawsuits. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained using large amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it copyright protected. When companies disclose these data sources it leaves them open to legal challenges. OpenAI rival Stability AI, for example, is currently being sued by stock image maker Getty Images for using its copyrighted data to train its AI image generator.
Aaaaaand there it is. They don’t want to admit how much copyrighted materials they’ve been using.
If it’s the same thing, then why describe it as an AI scraping it’s not. It’s a company that has scraped a corpus of data from the internet and has used that to train an AI.
The problem is that intellectual property law is complex. Simply saying two things are the same thing is your personal opinion. Content on the internet is not by-and-large public domain. It comes with a license, which lets you use it for certain purposes and not others. Saying, for example an AI reading a book is just like a human reading a book’ (not something you said, I don’t think) betrays a certain naivety about the way IP works.