It doesn't store the actual links; it just stores information about their likelihood of being used together. So for things that are regularly quoted in the data, it will under some circumstances, with very careful prompting, and enough tries at the prompt, spit out chunks of a copyrighted text. This is not its purpose, and it's not trying to do this, but users can carefully engineer it to get this result if they try really hard. So no, it's not an obfuscated recreation of that copyrighted work.

Of course, if you read NYT's argument, they're also mad when it's incorrect about the text, or when it hallucinates articles that don't exist. Essentially they're mad that this technology exists at all.

> it just stores information about their likelihood of being used together

I mean this is still a link, no?

Like, sure, it is a probability. But if each of those probabilities is like 99.9999% likely to get you to a chain of outputs that verbatim reproduces the copyrighted text given the right prompt, isn't that still the same thing?

And yeah, it hallucinating that the NYT published an article stating something it didn't say is concerning as well. If the model started telling everyone Matticus_Rex is a criminal and committed all these crimes and started listing off hallucinated court cases and news articles proving such things that would be quite damaging to your reputation, wouldn't it? The model hallucinating the NYT publishing an article talking about how the moon landing was fake or something would be damaging to its reputation right?