That's irrelevant. The main point is that they are re-distributing the content without permission from the copyright owners, so they are sort of implicitly claiming they have copy/distribution rights over it. Since they don't, then it's obvious they can't give you this content at all.
>The main point is that they are re-distributing the content without permission from the copyright owners,
By your logic, Firefox is re-distributing content without permission from the copyright owners whenever you use it to read a pirated book. ChatGPT isn't just randomly generating copyrighted content, it just does so when explicitly prompted by a user.
That is not the same thing at all. If I search on Google for copyrighted content and Google shows me the content, it is the server which serves the content who is most directly responsible, not Google nor I. Firefox is only a neutral agent, whereas ChatGPT is the source of the copyrighted content.
Of course, if the input I give to ChatGPT is "here is a piece from an NYT aricle, please tell it to me again verbatim", followed by a copy I got from the NYT archive, and ChatGPT is returning the same text I gave it as input, that is not copyright infringement. But if I say "please show me the text of the NYT article on crime from 10th January 1993", and ChatGPT returns the exact text of that article, then they are obviously infringing on NYT's distribution rights for this content, since they are retrieving it from their own storage.
If they returned a link you could click, t and retrieved the content from the NYT, along with any other changes such as advertising, even if it were inside an iframe, it would be an entirely different matter.