This is interesting in terms of copyright law. So far the lawsuits from Sarah Silverman and others haven’t gone anywhere on the theory that the models do not contain a copies of books. Copyright law hinges on whether you have a right to make copies of a work. So the theory has been the models learned from the books but didn’t retain exact copies, like how a human reads a book and learns it’s contents but does not store an exact copy in their head. If the models “memorized” training data, including copyrighten works, OpenAI and others may have a problem (note the researchers said they did this same thing on other models).
For the silicone valley drama addicts, I find it curious that the researchers apparently didn’t do this test on Bard of Anthropic’s Claude, at least the article didn’t mention them. Curious.