AI

You don't have to pay the rightsholder if your hired human reads various newspapers in order to learn how to write. Or at least no more than a single person's subscription fee to said content.

So why the hell should you have to pay more to train an AI model on the same content?

It's faster than a human? So what? Why does that entitle you to more money? There are fast and slow humans already, and we don't charge them differently for access to copyright material.

The tool that's being created is used by more than one human/organization? So what? Freelance journalists write for many publications after having learned on your material. You aren't charging them a license fee for every org they write for.

That being said, this is one of those turning points in the world where it doesn't matter what the results of these lawsuits are, this technology is going to use copyrighted material whether it's licensed or not. Companies will just need to adapt to the new reality.

OpenAI and other large companies are the target right now, but the much smaller open source generative AI models are catching up fast, and there's no way to stop individuals using copyright material to train or personalize their AI, currently it's processing intensive to train, but it's already dropped in price by orders of magnitude, and it's going to keep getting cheaper as computing hardware gets better.

If all you see is the article written by Joe Guy, and it's a good article with useful information, you can't prove that Joe even used a tool most of the time, let alone that the tool was trained on a specific piece of copyrighted material, especially if everyone's training for their AI is a little bit different. Unless it straight up plagiarizes, no court is going to convict Joe. Avoiding direct plagiarism is as easy as having a plagiarism tool double check against the original training material.