Morality and legality aside, there's a substantive difference between use of content and use of a model. Pretraining a GPT 4-class model from raw data requires trillions of tokens and millions of dollars in compute, whereas distilling a model using GPT 4's output requires orders of magnitude less data. Add to that the fact that OpenAI is probably subsidizing compute at their current per-token cost, and it's clearly unsustainable.
The morality of training on internet-scale text data is another discussion, but I would point out that this has been standard practice since the advent of the internet, both for training smaller models and for fueling large tech companies such as Google. Broadly speaking, there is nothing wrong with mere consumption. What gets both morally and legally more complex is production - how much are you allowed to synthesize from the training data? And that is a fair question.
The morality of training on internet-scale text data is another discussion, but I would point out that this has been standard practice since the advent of the internet, both for training smaller models and for fueling large tech companies such as Google. Broadly speaking, there is nothing wrong with mere consumption. What gets both morally and legally more complex is production - how much are you allowed to synthesize from the training data? And that is a fair question.