But they didn't break the law. The NYT articles were not algorithms/AI.
It's bad faith because they are saying "well, they should have done [unreasonable thing]". I explored their version of things from my perspective (it's not possible) and from a conciliatory perspective (okay, let's say they somehow try to navigate that hurdle anyways, is society better off? Why do I think it's infeasible?)
If they didn't break the law, your pragmatic point about outcomes is irrelevant. Open AI is in the clear regardless of whether they are doing something great or something useless. So I don't honestly know what you're trying to say. I'm not sure why getting licenses to IP you want to use is unreasonable, it happens all the time.
Edit: Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. is a great example of a case where a tech giant tried to legally get the rights to use a whole bunch of copyrighted content (~all books ever published), but failed. The net result was they had to completely shut off access to most of the Google Books corpus, even though it would have been (IMO) a net benefit to society if they had been able to do what they wanted.