It isn’t, but the GDPR requires companies to scrub PII when requested by the individual. OpenAI obviously can’t do that so in theory they would be liable for essentially unlimited fines unless they deleted the offending models.

In practice it remains to be seen how courts would interpret this though, and I expect unless the problem is really egregious there will be some kind of exception. Nobody wants to be the one to say these models are illegal.

I can think of two ways it’s significantly different:

1. Legally (in the United States specifically) the courts have previously ruled that search engines collecting links to other people’s data is fair use, as it’s a mutually beneficial thing for all parties: users find the info that they’re looking for, search helps drive traffic to providers of info and services, and the search engine profits off connecting them to each other.

https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html

https://copyright.columbia.edu/basics/fair-use.html

1. Unlike Wikipedia, for example, info that’s chewed up, processed, and regurgitated by “AI” chat bots and the like is totally unsourced, unaccountable, and passed off as original, authentic knowledge. ChatGPT is collecting various data from all of the net and forming it into something that appears to be presentable and correct, but it’s merely recycling ideas from other people’s work without any first-hand knowledge, thought, or attribution. Even the people who create “AI” can’t even connect the dots about why it says what it says, let alone have it properly source where the information came from.

It isn’t. If someone is upset about this wait until they find out google’s web cache or the wayback machine exists.