I wish I knew what the eventual business model will look like, but I don't. A potential guess might be to consider what MSNBC was, or was supposed to be -- a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC network news, where the idea was to take advantage of the emerging WWW to get a head start on everyone else. The pie-in-the-sky synergies that were promised never materialized, so the outcome just amounted to a new name for an old-media player. As it turned out, the business of gathering and delivering news and editorial content didn't change much at all. It just migrated from paper and screens to, well, screens.

Now, as you point out, companies like OpenAI have a problem, and so do the rest of us. Fair compensation for journalists and editors requires attribution before anything else can even be negotiated, and AI literally transforms its input into something that is usually (but obviously not always) untraceable. For the big AI players, the solution to that problem might involve starting or acquiring news and content networks of their own. Synergies that Microsoft and NBC were hoping might materialize could actually be feasible now.

So to answer your question, maybe ChatGPT will end up paying journalists directly.

Again, I don't know how plausible that kind of scenario might turn out to be. But I am absolutely certain that countries that allow their legacy rightsholders to impede progress in AI are going to be outcompeted by those with less to lose.