At best it will be a slight setback, I think the cats just outta the bag now.

Lathe: Copyright remains, but big companies are allowed to use AI to squeeze labour regardless.

consider this capitalist rivalry. openai basically undermining the writing sector. To cheapen costs NYT would have to eventually adopt this, but it basically cheapens the content produced. it is basically massed produced stuff that will eventually just be really dull. sports illustrated just recently fired their ceo for having already used ai generated stuff.

Buzzfeed tried to replace their news department with ChatGPT and failed. They shut down the division instead. Even though Buzzfeed was already creating nothing original and just publishing a mashup of shit from other sources. Still too complicated for the dumbass plagiarism algorithms, which are basically incapable of producing anything that humans find interesting for more than a few seconds and a couple of "oohs and ahs". LOL.

The cat's already out of the bag. I would be extremely surprised if the NYT gets what they want instead of a "win" where OpenAI pinky promises to stop using NYT content and pays $30 million in damages.

In this case, NYT most likely is actually just looking for a cut of the money. Their claims in this are too absurd to actually hold up under scrutiny, nobody is using ChatGPT to bypass NYT's paywall on whatever years old content they actually have in their training data, people are using browser extensions for that. I would also want to know who is the target of the claims that ChatGPT hallucinating about NYT articles is damaging NYT's reputation.

One of the more significant things that could happen is that OpenAI could be forced to disclose details of their training data as part of discovery, which they really will not want to do. It would then be pretty easy to gauge exactly how overfit ChatGPT is (GPT 4.0 has 1.1 trillion parameters, depending on what precision they run it at this would be around a terabyte or more in size, I think 3.5 is closer to 350B, if the dataset has less entropy than the model parameters it is effectively guaranteed to start spitting out exact copies of training data). It would also be very useful info for OpenAI's competitors, so OpenAI will try to get the suit dismissed or settle before then. Deleting their dataset like NYT is demanding is absolutely not going to happen, since at most they have standing to make them delete their articles from their training dataset. Finetuning the model to not comply with NYT-related requests would also be enough to get their model to no longer infringe on their copyrights as well.

They might also be angling for government regulation with a lawsuit making bold claims that they expect to catch headlines and shape public opinion but don't completely expect to stick in court, since that's a recurring pattern in a lot of lawsuits against AI firms, like the Stable Diffusion lawsuit which contained absolute bangers like the claim that it stores compressed images just like JPEG compression and that the text-prompt interface "creates a layer of magical misdirection that makes it harder for users to coax out obvious copies of training images" (this is actually in the announcement for that lawsuit, I'm not making this shit up. It's really not surprising that most of that suit got thrown out).

There's no real endgame for them where they get anything further than a cut. AI companies can still train on copyright-free or licensed data and over time will get similar results, so there's not really anything that can be done to stop that in general. Copyright-reliant industries can certainly secure themselves a better position within that, though, where they might be able to gain either a steady income from licensing fees or exclusive use of their content for models under their control.