If those web pages are human accessible for free then I can’t see how they could be considered anything other than public domain information
I don’t think that’s the case. A photographer can post pictures on their website for free, but that doesn’t make it legal for anyone else to slap the pictures on t-shirts and sell them.
Because that becomes distribution.
Which is the crux of this issue: using the data for training was probably legal use under copyright, but if the AI begins to share training data that is distribution, and that is definitely illegal.
It wasn’t. It is commercial use to train and sell a programm with it and that is regulated differently than private use. The data is still 1 to 1 part of the product. In fact this instance of chatGPT being able to output training data means the data is still there unchanged.
If training AI with text is made legally independent of the license of said text then by the same logic programming code and text can no longer be protected by it at all.
First of all no: Training a model and selling the model is demonstrably equivalent to re-distributing the raw data.
Secondly: What about all the copyleft work in there? That work is specifically licensed such that nobody can use the work to create a non-free derivative, which is exactly what openAI has done.
Copyleft is the only valid argument here. Everything else falls under fair use as it is a derivative work.