[anileated]

It’s fair if you do this; neither fair nor legal [0] when a commercial for-profit entity, backed by a large corporation, does it at scale and capitalizes on that.

Imagine if you were a webmaster and Google unilaterally decided to stop sending users to content you have worked to research and write, and instead aggregated it and showed the answer to user’s query entirely on its own pages, without any attribution or payment to you. Unimaginable, yet that is very much the scenario unfolding now. [1]

Scraping at this kind of scale is out of your (or any given individual’s) reach. It is, however, within reach of the likes of Microsoft (on whose billions OpenAI basically exists) and Google (who, to be fair, have not abused it in such a blatant way so far).

[0] It is clearly using someone else’s works for commercial purposes, including to create derivative works. (Again, it’s different from you creating a work derivative from someone else’s work you read previously, because in this case a corporation does it at scale for profit.)

[1] And the cynic in me says the only reason we are not yet out with pitchforks is simply because OpenAI is new and shiny and has “open” in its name (never mind the shadow of Microsoft looming all over it), while Google is an entrenched behemoth that we all had some degree of dissatisfaction with in the past and thus are constantly watching out for.