Despite the cynical responses here there is actually a practical reason why OpenAI is paying for this: The AP News Archive is not available online to be crawled. See https://www.ap.org/content/archive
There's a reasonable strong argument that crawling public pages for "indexing" (aka learning) is fair use based on the Google precedent and case law from ther early 2000s.
The argument is much less strong if those records aren't available.
There's a reasonable strong argument that crawling public pages for "indexing" (aka learning) is fair use based on the Google precedent and case law from ther early 2000s.
The argument is much less strong if those records aren't available.