Jason’s prediction has not come true as of November 30, 2025.

1. There is heavy IP/copyright litigation, but no shutdowns or “near‑death” events
Generative‑AI developers have indeed been hit with major lawsuits:

• The New York Times and other newspapers are suing OpenAI and Microsoft over training on news articles; a judge allowed core copyright claims to proceed, but did not order ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot to be shut down or suspended.(apnews.com)
• The Authors Guild and groups of authors, as well as multiple newspapers, have parallel copyright suits against OpenAI and Microsoft; these are in discovery and briefing, not injunction/enforcement stages.(authorsguild.org)
• Visual artists are suing Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and others; some claims were allowed to proceed, but again without any order halting their systems.(reuters.com)
• Record labels sued music‑generation startups Suno and Udio; this led to settlements and planned migration to licensed models and download limits, not service shutdown.(cnbc.com)

So Jason was right that “piracy/IP” litigation would arrive, but the effect has been lawsuits, settlements, and licensing deals—not stopping services “dead in their tracks.”

2. Courts have often trimmed or rejected the most extreme copyright theories
Key early cases have largely weakened the shutdown narrative:

• In the Getty Images v. Stability AI case in the UK, the High Court dismissed Getty’s core copyright claims, finding Stable Diffusion does not store or reproduce copyrighted works and rejecting secondary infringement; only narrow trademark issues (e.g., Getty watermarks in outputs) partially succeeded. No injunction barred Stable Diffusion’s operation.(washingtonpost.com)
• In the GitHub Copilot class action (Doe v. GitHub), the court has dismissed most of the 22 claims, including key DMCA copyright claims; only a couple of contract/license claims remain, and Copilot continues to operate.(theregister.com)
• Anthropic settled a major author lawsuit by agreeing to pay about $1.5 billion and destroy specific pirated book files, but the court found that the training itself was not illegal; Claude continues to run while Anthropic switches to lawful data sources.(apnews.com)
• A German court held that ChatGPT’s training on certain song lyrics violated German copyright and ordered damages, but did not order ChatGPT shut down.(theguardian.com)

These outcomes are economically painful and may change training practices, but they are a far cry from a Napster‑style injunction or a YouTube‑style existential “near‑shutdown.”

3. The flagship systems are expanding, not constrained like Napster/YouTube were

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT has exploded in usage: by 2025 it is handling on the order of 1–2.5 billion prompts per day, with hundreds of millions of weekly active users and projections of tens of billions in annual revenue, indicating ongoing expansion rather than a litigation‑induced freeze.(timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
• Microsoft has deeply integrated Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) into Windows, Microsoft 365, and the Windows 11 taskbar, treating it as a core platform feature rather than a legally precarious experiment.(en.wikipedia.org)
• OpenAI and others have signed broad licensing deals with major publishers (e.g., Future, Vox, News Corp, Financial Times, The Atlantic) specifically to reduce copyright risk while continuing to scale their models and products.(theverge.com)

In contrast, Napster was effectively forced offline by injunctions and could not continue its original service model; it shut down its network in 2001 and later went bankrupt.(en.wikipedia.org) YouTube, while not shut down, faced intense litigation (e.g., Viacom v. YouTube) that led to major compliance systems like Content ID and serious fears about its viability in the late 2000s.(en.wikipedia.org) Nothing comparable—no complete shutdown, no court‑ordered removal of the core model or service—has yet happened to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or similarly central generative‑AI products.

4. Some niche services have been reshaped, but not “stopped dead”
Music‑generation startups (Suno, Udio) and image models (e.g., Stability AI) have had to negotiate settlements, plan transitions to licensed datasets, or accept narrower operational constraints.(reuters.com) That is a meaningful level of legal friction, but still far from the prediction that generative AI as a class (particularly ChatGPT/Bing‑style systems) would experience a YouTube‑ or Napster‑level near‑death experience.

Conclusion
Jason correctly foresaw a wave of piracy/IP litigation against generative AI, but his stronger claim—that this litigation would halt or severely constrain major generative‑AI systems in a way comparable to Napster’s shutdown or YouTube’s early “near‑death” period—has not materialized. The flagship systems are larger and more deeply integrated into products than ever, with courts so far mostly trimming claims or steering outcomes toward damages, settlements, and licensing rather than existential injunctions.

Given the amount of time elapsed since the February 2023 prediction and the current legal and commercial landscape, the prediction is best classified as wrong rather than merely “too early to tell.”