IP law was to promote human progress by giving financial incentive to create this IP knowing it was protected, and you could make money off it.
Copyright is not a natural right by any measure; it's something we pulled out of our asses a couple hundred years ago in response to a need that existed at the time. To the extent copyright interferes with progress, as it appears to have sworn to do, it has to go.
Sorry. Don't shoot the messenger.
It's not just about profits, it's about paying reporters to do honest work and not cut corners in their reporting and data collection.
If you think the data is valuable, then you should be prepared to pay the people who collect it, same as you pay for the service that collates it (ChatGPT)
Now, as you point out, companies like OpenAI have a problem, and so do the rest of us. Fair compensation for journalists and editors requires attribution before anything else can even be negotiated, and AI literally transforms its input into something that is usually (but obviously not always) untraceable. For the big AI players, the solution to that problem might involve starting or acquiring news and content networks of their own. Synergies that Microsoft and NBC were hoping might materialize could actually be feasible now.
So to answer your question, maybe ChatGPT will end up paying journalists directly.
Again, I don't know how plausible that kind of scenario might turn out to be. But I am absolutely certain that countries that allow their legacy rightsholders to impede progress in AI are going to be outcompeted by those with less to lose.
That's a huge assumption in the first place. An even bigger leap to tie that general proposition to what's happening here.
I sometimes wonder if people commenting on this topic on HN really understand how fundamental copyright as a concept is to the entire tech industry. And indeed even to capitalism itself.