Whether that falls under fair use is highly debatable.

It's going through the courts right now. We'll probably have an answer in a year or two.

I felt for a long time that it should be fair use. If an LLM can abstract what it learns from the copyrighted work, then that seems "fair" because that's what humans do.

But ... as I've thought about it more, it doesn't really feel just to me. The kind of value reaped from the works seems to suggest that the creator is due some portion of that value. Also, in practice - there's just an absolutely enormous amount of knowledge that can be consumed from the public domain. Even if Meta, OpenAI and friends decided to license a ~small handful of the long-term archives of some globally-read newspapers, they could get very broad and deep knowledge about the events, trends, terms of the last century to fill in a lot of gaps.