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 you read a copyrighted material without paying and then forgot most of it a month later with vague recollection of what you’ve read the fact is you still accessed and used the copyrighted material without paying.
Now let’s go a step further, you write something that is inspired by that copyrighted material and what you wrote become successful to some degree with eyes on it, but you refuse to admit that’s where you got the idea from because you only have a vague recollection. The fact is you got the idea from the copyrighted material.
FWIW that’s pretty much exactly how all creative works are created. Especially music.
Except the illegally obtaining the copyrighted material part, which is the main point. And definitely not on this scale.