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 there can be said to be a meaningful difference due to the sheer scale and speed at which AIs can do this though.
Ultimately, I think it’s less of a direct legal question and more a societal question of whether or not we think this is fair or not. I’d expect it to ultimately be resolved by legislative bodies, not the courts.