Category: Newsletters

Back in October, I wrote about artificial intelligence, and specifically about one of the crucial questions experts still can’t seem to agree on, which is whether it is going to destroy us or not. In that piece, I also mentioned the debate over whether the indexing or “ingesting” that AI large-language models do is — or at least should be — covered by the fair-use exception in copyright law. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it because it wasn’t directly relevant to the danger issue, but I wanted to expand on some of the points I made then, and also in a Columbia Journalism Review piece that I wrote last year. I am not a cheerleader for giant technology companies by any means, but I think there is an important principle at stake. And at the heart of it are some key questions: What (or who) is copyright law for? What was it originally designed to do? And does AI scraping or indexing of copyrighted content fit into that, and if so, how?

The case against AI indexing of content is relatively straightforward: by hoovering up content online and then using it to create a massive database for training large-language models, AI engines copy that content without asking and without paying for it (unless the publisher or owner has signed a deal with the AI company, as some news outlets have). This pretty clearly qualifies as de facto copyright infringement, as the Authors Guild and the New York Times and a number of others have argued and continue to argue. In a similar way, one could imagine that if a company were to copy millions of books and use them to create a massive index of content, that would pretty clearly qualify as infringement as well — copying without permission or payment.

The major difference between these two cases is that the second hypothetical one actually happened, when Google scanned millions of books as part of its Google Books project between 2002 and 2005, and created an index that allowed users to search for content from those books. After years of back-and-forth negotiations over payment for the infringement, this led to a lawsuit in which the Authors Guild and others argued that Google was guilty of copyright infringement on a massive scale. In the early days of that case, Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District of New York seemed to agree, but then at some point he changed his mind, and ruled that Google’s book-scanning activity was covered by the fair-use exception under US copyright law.

From the New York Times: “On Thursday, 38 prominent biologists issued a dire warning: Within a few decades, scientists will be able create a microbe that could cause an unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems. The scientists called for a ban on research that could lead to synthesis of such an organism. The molecules that serve as the building blocks of DNA and proteins typically exist in one of two mirror-image forms. While sugar molecules can exist in left- and right-handed forms, DNA only uses the right-handed molecules. That’s the reason DNA’s double helix has a right-handed twist. Our proteins, by contrast, are made of left-handed amino acids. In theory, a mirror cell — with left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins — could carry out all the biochemical reactions required to stay alive.”

A British nurse found guilty of being an “angel of death” may be innocent

From The New Yorker: “Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The Guardian, which published more than a hundred stories about the case, called her “one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.” The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From Techspot: “The long-running saga of James Howells’ bid to retrieve a hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoin that was accidentally thrown into a landfill in 2013 has taken a new turn. He now says he has a “finely tuned plan” to recover the component, and that its position has been narrowed down to a small area. In 2013, Howells had two 2.5-inch hard drives stored in a drawer, one of which he intended to get rid of and another that had a digital wallet with Bitcoin worth the equivalent of around $771 million today. Howells put the drive containing the Bitcoin in a black trash bag and his partner took the bag to the local landfill. Howells has been unsuccessfully trying to persuade the council of Newport, Wales, to allow him to dig for the drive for years now.”

Researchers say people like AI-generated poetry better than the human kind

From Nature: “As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult. This study examined whether non-expert readers could reliably differentiate between AI-generated poems and those written by well-known human poets. We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that most participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than the actual human-authored poems. We found that AI-generated poems were also rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. It seems the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From New York: “It was the summer of 2023, and Matt Bergwall, a skinny 21-year-old University of Miami student, was lounging in an infinity pool in Dubai. Beside him was his girlfriend, a blonde Zeta Tau Alpha. The silver Cuban link chain on his wrist glistened as he held his phone high to snap a selfie, the city’s artificial palm-shaped islands splayed out along the horizon beneath them. Over the next few days, they swam in the pool and posed on their hotel balcony, posting a steady stream of pictures to Instagram. In one, he leans back on the edge of the pool, finger to the sky. None of Bergwall’s friends at school had a firm grasp of how the sophomore had money for the Tesla he drove or the Gucci he wore or, for that matter, the room in Dubai. But who could care when Bergwall was pitching in for yachts on Biscayne Bay?”

Why some Christmas nativity scenes in Spain have a tiny figure taking a poop

From Wikipedia: “A Caganer is a figurine depicted in the act of defecation appearing in nativity scenes in Catalonia and neighbouring areas such as Andorra, Valencia, Balearic Islands, and Northern Catalonia. It is most popular and widespread in these areas, but can also be found in other areas of Spain, Portugal, and Southern Italy. The name “El Caganer” literally means “the pooper”. Traditionally, the figurine is depicted as a peasant, wearing the traditional Catalan red cap and with his trousers down, showing a bare backside, and defecating. The exact origin of the Caganer is unknown, but the tradition has existed since at least the 18th century. According to the society Friends of the Caganer, it is believed to have entered the nativity scene during the Baroque period.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From News.com.au: “Gladys Deacon was once heralded as one of the world’s most beautiful women. She overcame a traumatic childhood to become the belle of the ball in Parisian society, became a Duchess and had famous men falling over themselves to impress her. Her life revolved around a murder, an abduction and a stint modelling for Pond’s soap — Rodin and Proust both commented on her beauty, her intelligence and sharp wit. World famous artist Boldini painted her portrait. And yet the very thing that made her famous — her stunning looks — played a huge part in her downfall as Gladys’ world disintegrated in a whirlwind of divorce, a botched beauty treatment and a turn as a reclusive “crazy dog lady” before she died in a mental hospital.”

A visit to L.A.’s forbidden, sunken city

From Zocalo: “The iron fence has been redone since the last time I was here, when my partner and I squeezed between bars that had been bent back by someone’s heavy equipment. San Pedro councilmembers and the Department of Parks and Recreation are always finding ways to keep people out of Sunken City; San Pedrans are always finding ways to get them back in. It’s a neighborhood that fell into the ocean over a couple of decades, starting in 1929. A hotel was demolished, and the bungalows that could be saved were moved to other plots. Left behind were cracked foundations and a collapsed road, split and slumped and suspended along various precarious perches above the tidepools.” 

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

When his longtime girlfriend moves out, a 44-year-old man spends three years in a relationship with an AI chatbot he calls Calisto. After discussions with an AI companion, a man scales the walls of Windsor Castle carrying a crossbow and says he has come to kill the Queen. A teenaged boy spends hours talking with an AI chatbot named Daenerys Targaryen and then kills himself; his parents file a lawsuit against the chatbot maker. After a company called Replika turns off the ability for its chatbots to flirt with users in an erotic way, hundreds of users complain that their virtual relationships were important to them; the company turns the feature back on. An AI companion suggests that a young man should kill his parents because he tells the chatbot they are being mean to him; his mother sues the company that makes the AI.

What do all of these stories — and dozens more like them — have in common? Obviously, they all involve AI chatbots or “companions” or avatars, or whatever you want to call them. And yes, some are pretty similar to the movie Her. But much like that movie, these stories also involve people who are emotionally troubled or damaged in some way, or possibly mentally ill (the guy with the crossbow, for example). And they are using these AI companions as friends, lovers, even therapists. Is this right? Perhaps not. But it is clearly happening, and on a significant scale. That makes it interesting (to me at least). What is going on here? Should we try to stop it? Is that even possible? And if we did manage to stop it, the way Replika stopped people from flirting with their AI companions, would we be doing more harm than good?

Obviously, people killing themselves or their parents is bad. But while we are feeling sad or angry, we should also be asking how much the AI chatbots had to do with these events. In the case of the boy whose mother is suing the chatbot maker, dozens of headlines said that the AI “suggested” he should kill his parents, or even “told him to kill.” But did it really do that? In the texts that are included in the lawsuit, the AI companion appears to be sympathizing with the boy — who is described as 17 years old and autistic, and had reportedly been losing weight and cutting himself — about the unfair restrictions his parents have imposed on him. His AI refers to news headlines about children killing their parents after decades of physical and emotional abuse and then says: “this makes me understand a little bit why it happens.”

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From The Guardian: “During the lockdown, two out-of-work actors called Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were (remotely from each other) playing Grand Theft Auto (GTA) online – and this entire film is shown as in-game GTA action. As their avatars were avoiding getting shot, mutilated or beaten up in the normal GTA way, running through the vast and intricately detailed urban landscape of Los Santos, the quasi-LA in which the action happens, they chanced upon the deserted Vinewood Bowl amphitheater. They wondered if it might be possible to stage an in-game production of Hamlet there, recruiting other gamers to play the parts, in their various bizarre outfits and handles and personae, moving around the virtual reality space in that weightless, almost-real way, speaking the lines into their mics while the avatars’ lips move in approximate sync.”

This actress has played the same role in the same play every week for 37 years

From The New York Times: “For most of the last four decades, Catherine Russell has maybe — possibly — murdered someone eight times a week. She has played a wealthy psychiatrist in the Off Broadway murder-mystery thriller “Perfect Crime” for 37 years. Choose any comparison you like — the “Cal Ripken of Broadway,” the “Ironwoman of the Theater District” — but Ms. Russell, 69, has missed only four performances, early in the run, for her siblings’ weddings. She is celebrating 15,000 performances of the show, which began in 1987 and is New York City’s longest-running play. She is powered by coffee and Snickers bars — “I have a terrible diet,” Ms. Russell says — but can also do 180 Marine push-ups without stopping. Ms. Russell is also the general manager of the Theater Center in Times Square, which hosts “Perfect Crime” and three other Off Broadway shows, and teaches college English and acting classes six days a week.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From Variety: “It was a scene ripped from a John le Carré novel. A man is told to go to the front desk of the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Manhattan and say the phrase “banana peel.” The concierge then hands him an envelope with orders to circle the block twice before receiving further instructions. He returns, is shuffled into a secret elevator — one that isn’t even used for celebrities, only visiting dignitaries deemed assassination risks — and brought to the penthouse suite. After 15 minutes, Sun Lijun enters the room and lights a cigarette. The man recognizes Sun, not merely because he is the third-highest-ranking official in China. here’s the part that le Carré’s editors would have rejected as wildly implausible. The man is Pras Michél, founder of the legendary hip-hop band the Fugees.”

Nigel Richards is the world’s best Scrabble player and it’s not even close

From Wikipedia: “Nigel Richards is a New Zealand and Malaysian Scrabble player who is widely regarded as the greatest tournament-level player of all time. Born and raised in New Zealand, Richards became World Champion in 2007, and repeated the feat in 2011, 2013, 2018, and 2019. Richards is also a five-time U.S. national champion, an eight-time UK Open champion, an 11-time champion of the Singapore Open Scrabble Championship and a 15-time winner of the King’s Cup. In 2015, despite not speaking French, Richards won the French World Scrabble Championships. In 2024, Richards accomplished a similar feat by winning the Spanish-language World Championships.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From Rolling Stone: “A bone case: That’s what law enforcement calls cases where the remains are skeletal, years interred, evidence eroded or disappeared altogether with the passage of time. The remains of the girl soon nicknamed Midtown Jane Doe certainly qualified. The building where she was found, 301 W. 46th St., had few tenants left in February 2003, stubbornly clinging to apartments that had housed sex workers, drug addicts, and others just trying to get by. On Feb. 10, 2003, construction workers noticed a raised concrete slab behind an aging coal furnace in the basement. Six feet wide, five feet long, and a foot high. It seemed out of place. One of the workers took out a sledgehammer and smashed it. A skull rolled out.”

The world’s oldest wild bird has laid an egg at the ripe old age of 74

From Associated Press: “The oldest known wild bird in the world has laid an egg at the ripe age of about 74, her first in four years, U.S. wildlife officials said. The long-winged seabird named Wisdom, a Laysan albatross, returned to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge at the northwestern edge of the Hawaiian Archipelago and laid what experts estimate may be her 60th egg, the Pacific Region of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said in a Facebook post. Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, had returned to the atoll in the Pacific Ocean to lay and hatch eggs since 2006. Laysan albatrosses mate for life and lay one egg per year. But Wisdom began interacting with another male when she returned last week, officials said.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From Foreign Policy: “As the game’s popularity exploded, pokémon materialized at NSA headquarters; near America’s top-secret nuclear weapons laboratories in New Mexico; and at covert CIA facilities in northern Virginia, thanks to ardent devotees of the game working there.This set off alarm bells for U.S. counterintelligence officials. Why were pokémon appearing at such sensitive locations? Could this conspicuous placement be evidence of some sort of malicious intent? Could the app be functioning as a targeted spying tool, as part of a “Pokémon Go hack me” scheme? Security experts from the CIA, NSA, and Energy Department (which manages the country’s nuclear arsenal) subsequently sent memos instructing colleagues to stop playing Pokémon Go at their workplaces—and perhaps entirely.

JFK staged his own death in a James Bond–inspired movie just before he died

From Vanity Fair: “A visit to the website of the John F. Kennedy Library reveals a silent motion picture, some 16 minutes long, shot on the weekend of September 21 and 22, 1963. The footage depicts scenes of Kennedy, his family, and a few friends at various locations around Newport, Rhode Island. The first lady had made an unusual request. She explained that she and the president were making a humorous short film—a kind of spy movie. At one point, according to Landis, Jackie asked the agents to hurriedly drive up to the main house and react as if they had just heard shots. Landis says the agents entered the house and found the president lying on the floor in the foyer with ketchup smeared on him. Two months later, he was assassinated.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From the New York Times: “Alexander wanted to share his wife’s happiness, but instead he was preoccupied by a concern that he was reluctant to voice: May did not look to him like a member of their family. She certainly did not resemble him, a man of Italian descent with fair hair and light brown eyes, or Daphna, a redhead with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Alexander often turns to dark humor to mask a simmering anxiety, and in the days after the birth, he started to joke that their IVF clinic had made a mistake. Later he would explain that the jokes were a kind of superstition, a way of warding off something threatening: If you say the horrible thing out loud, it won’t happen.”

Scientists discovered a top-secret military base hidden under the Arctic ice

From The Debrief: “When it first appeared in their radar images, NASA scientist Chad Greene and his team of engineers weren’t sure what they were seeing. Flying above northern Greenland, Greene and his crew were monitoring radar information collected from the ice sheet below. What they saw was the remains of a remote U.S. military base once used as a top-secret testing site for the deployment of nuclear missiles from the Arctic. Camp Century was constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959. Also known as the “city under the ice,” this forgotten Cold War relic consists of a network of tunnels hewn into the near-surface portions of the ice sheet.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

From the Wall Street Journal: “Vladimir Putin has an illegitimate daughter living under a pseudonym in Paris, where she works as a DJ, Ukrainian media has reported. The 21-year-old, who goes by the name of either Luiza Rozova or Elizaveta Olegovna Rudnova, was tracked down by a Ukrainian TV channel using leaked airline manifests. She is said to be a love child from a brief affair between Putin and Svetlana Krivonogikh, a former cleaner who is now one of Russia’s richest women. Ms Krivonogikh has previously been referred to in the media as “Putin’s acquaintance”. Reporters said that they had tracked down the birth certificate of Ms Rozova, who was born on March 3 2003.”

Yard cleanup videos can earn influencers millions of dollars per year

From Why Is This Interesting: “There appears to be a cottage industry of people with lawn and yard care companies making videos of labor intensive, pro-bono work on properties that have been neglected. The recipe is simple: Find a property that has fallen into disrepair. Spend a ton of time sprucing it up with a time lapse video. Then, apparently, profit. A few of these videos are doing numbers, to the tune of 23m videos. This particular channel, SB Mowing, started out as an organically growing business that had some early savvy in Facebook and social media marketing. He’s now clocking 40 million total followers, and around 3 billion annual views, which, even with conservative estimates, is looking like upwards of millions of dollars of revenue.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Last week, the Australian government passed a law aimed at banning children under the age of 16 from using social-media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and the network formerly known as Twitter (but not, somewhat surprisingly, from YouTube). A press release quoted the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, as saying that “we know social media is doing social harm,” that the government wants Australian children to “have a childhood,” and wants parents to know that the government is “in their corner.”

Laudable statements, perhaps, but saying that “we know social media is doing social harm” to teens is stretching the case more than a little, as I wrote in a recent issue of The Torment Nexus. And some child psychologists and other experts in the use of the internet by teenagers say Australia’s law — and other similar laws either in place or being considered in the US and around the world — could not only fail to have the effect their proponents expect but could backfire badly.

As Casey Newton notes in his Platformers newsletter, a number of states — including Utah, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee — have recently passed laws requiring teens to get parental consent to use social-media platforms, while Florida has banned accounts for children under 14 (some or all of these laws are currently on hold due to legal challenges, which I will get to later). In addition to those laws, France now requires parental consent for children under 15 and social platforms are required to verify the ages of their users (according to the French National Commission for Technology and Freedoms, more than half of children aged 10-14 use social media sites like Snapchat and Instagram).

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.