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.
I think it’s a basic requirement that the data upon which a large language model is trained be publicly disclosed. It’s the same as the requirement of writing the ingredients in packaged food. Or in knowing where your lawyer got their degree from. You want to know where what you’re using is coming from.