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.
This is one of those cases where copywrite law works opposite as intended; in that it should drive innovation. Here we have an example of innovation, but copywrite holders want to (justifiably) shut it down.
I think this is actually a case where copyright works correctly. It is protecting individuals of getting their work, they provided for free in many cases, ‘stolen’ by a more powerful party to make money from it without paying the creators of their work.