Wed: Perhaps the Scariest Poll Result I Have Ever Read

I Wonder if They Will Use ChatGPT to Write the Defense Briefs

New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI for ‘billions’

The lawsuit, which also names Microsoft as a defendant, says the firms should be held responsible for "billions of dollars" in damages.

ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) "learn" by analysing a massive amount of data often sourced online.

The BBC has approached OpenAI and Microsoft for comment.

The lawsuit claims "millions" of articles published by the New York Times were used without its permission to make ChatGPT smarter, and claims the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a trustworthy information source.

It alleges that when asked about current events, ChatGPT will sometimes generate "verbatim excerpts" from New York Times articles, which cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription.

According to the lawsuit, this means readers can get New York Times content without paying for it - meaning it is losing out on subscription revenue as well as advertising clicks from people visiting the website.

It also gave the example of the Bing search engine - which has some features powered by ChatGPT - producing results taken from a New York Times-owned website, without linking to the article or including referral links
it uses to generate income.

Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion (£7.8 billion) in OpenAI.

The OOP is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things

Republicans, particularly elected Republicans, pretend to care about many things. They pretend to care about the border. They pretend to care about crime. They pretend to care about “woke” teachers and professors in our public schools and universities, and they pretend to care about the type of books read by students who attend those schools and universities. They pretend to care about gender-affirming care for children they’ll never encounter, and they pretend to care about forcibly maintaining the unwanted pregnancies of people they have no interest in or respect for.

Republicans spend so much time and effort pretending to care about these things because they want to distract Americans from what it is they really don’t give a damn about. Namely, they care not about the actual health, well-being, and survival of the ordinary people they’re paid to represent, especially those who happen to be from poorer or low-income families—children in particular.

But most of all, Republicans want to distract us to avoid the fact that Democrats actually do care about such things.

Beginning at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, states were prohibited, thanks to a law introduced by Democrats, from unenrolling Medicaid recipients—through regular eligibility based on family size and income—if they wanted to keep their funding. The process was called “continuous enrollment,” and according to KFF, it kept approximately 23 million Americans added to the Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program rolls during that time of unprecedented economic crisis. Nearly one-third of those people were children. As of December 2022, the total Medicaid/CHIP enrollment numbers had grown to approximately 92 million.

By law, the period of continuous enrollment ended on March 31, and the Medicaid unwinding, as it’s called, began. States began to quickly “unwind” their Medicaid/CHIP rolls, a process that resulted in cutting millions of people off from the health coverage they’d relied on during the pandemic. According to a study by KFF, about 70% of those cut off since March were removed due to “procedural” reasons, such as failing to return paperwork to confirm their eligibility—often because they had moved.

Some states performed their unwinding process with what can most charitably be described as callous indifference. In Texas alone, as reported by the Texas Tribune, approximately 600,000 Medicaid/CHIP recipients were cut off from coverage. This severance happened not because their income had increased so much to render them ineligible, not because their children had aged out of the program, but because of “procedural” errors, including “everything from sending in applications in the mail a day late to not including the correct documentation.”

What 750,000 Americans signing up for ACA coverage in a single day really says about our politics