> This is just vandalism from badly supervised ‘agents’ which don’t know what they are doing or why. You could set this up with a short perl script, and the human setting it up would be held responsible for the spam - why is this different when it’s AI agents set up by a human and allowed to post to the internet at large?

It's not, but the courts and the legal system move slowly by design. There is absolutely legal risk for OpenAI here that will not close until the Statue of Limitations has expired.