If they were only copying, for example, New York Times articles and many publishers to a disk, I don't think NYT and the publishers would have sued OpenAI. But OpenAI isn't just copying things to disk. NYT reported ChatGPT (before Dec 2023, [0]) was returning near verbatim sections of NYT articles.

Is this stealing? Is it depriving NYT or publishers/writers from money via lost sales/subs? I don't know, but it certainly could be.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t...