Happy Wednesday! To the Idaho man arrested Monday on alcohol charges after allegedly kicking a bison, here’s a friendly reminder that, in the game of drunk man versus wildlife, the wildlife always wins.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Israel would move forward with a military offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah “to eliminate the Hamas battalions there,” regardless of whether his government is able to strike a deal with the terror group to secure the release of hostages in exchange for a temporary truce. Netanyahu’s pledge came hours before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel to push a U.S.-backed deal that would free 33 Israeli hostages in the first phase in exchange for a six-week ceasefire and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. “We are determined to get a ceasefire that brings the hostages home and to get it now, and the only reason that that wouldn’t be achieved is because of Hamas,” Blinken said Wednesday morning, speaking alongside Israeli President Isaac Herzog. “There is a proposal on the table, and as we’ve said, no delays, no excuses.”
- The United Kingdom’s National Health Services (NHS) plans to propose changes to its constitution that would separate single-sex wards according to “biological sex,” Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins announced Tuesday. The new measure would mean that transgender individuals would be placed in wards with people of their biological sex or in a single-patient room when possible. “The government has been clear that biological sex matters,” Atkins said. “The constitution proposal makes clear what patients can expect from NHS services in meeting their needs, including the different biological needs of the sexes.” The NHS Constitution of England was last updated in 2015 and is required to be updated at least every ten years; there will now be an eight-week review of the proposal.
- House Democrats confirmed on Tuesday they would not let a measure to oust Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson succeed, effectively killing the motion to vacate led by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. The motion was already unlikely to succeed—having the public support of only two other House Republicans—but Greene indicated Tuesday she will move ahead with the measure anyway. Meanwhile, Johnson clarified to reporters that he never requested House Democrats’ help, saying their statement was “the first I heard of” their support.
- New York Judge Juan Merchan held former President Donald Trump in criminal contempt of court on Tuesday, fining him $9,000 and threatening the possibility of jail time. Merchan—who is overseeing Trump’s New York criminal trial—determined Trump violated a gag order restraining him from publicly commenting on witnesses and others related to his trial. Trump is also ordered to remove the nine violations—seven social media posts and two campaign website posts—by 2:15 p.m. Wednesday. Shortly after Merchan’s ruling, Trump took to social media to accuse the judge of “taking away my FREEDOM OF SPEECH” and “RIGGING THE PRESIDENTIAL OF 2024 ELECTION.”
- Eight regional U.S. newspapers—owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital—on Tuesday sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The publications—which include the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News—allege OpenAI and Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbots were trained on “millions” of their articles without permission. The New York Times filed a similar lawsuit against the two tech companies in December.
- New York police dressed in riot gear on Wednesday evening cleared an administrative building anti-Israel students had occupied, vandalized, and blockaded overnight on Tuesday. Columbia administrators said Wednesday they invited the NYPD onto campus to “restore safety and order to our community,” and threatened students in the building with expulsion. Police arrested dozens of students, and administrators requested a police presence remain on campus until at least May 17. At UCLA, meanwhile, violent clashes between anti-Israel demonstrators and counter-protesters broke out overnight, prompting school administrators to request support from the Los Angeles police.
The New Frontier in Copyright Enforcement
After a handful of newspapers on Tuesday sued Microsoft and artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI, alleging the companies’ chatbots surfaced their articles verbatim, we tried to get ChatGPT—OpenAI’s souped-up search engine—to reproduce one of our favorite G-Files, 2021’s “American Passover.”
Either ChatGPT is not training on intellectual property or it’s covering its tracks after landing in hot water, because this is the response it came up with: “I’m sorry for any confusion, but I can’t provide the full text of a specific column from The Dispatch, including ‘American Passover,’ as it’s a paid subscription-based publication, and providing verbatim text would go against copyright policies,” the response read. “However, I can summarize the key points or themes of the column if you’d like.” (It couldn’t, actually.)
Eight newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital, an investment firm, filed suit Tuesday against OpenAI and its financial and cloud-computing backer, Microsoft, alleging the companies violated copyright laws by training their generative AI programs on the newspapers’ content and surfacing exactly what ChatGPT claimed it doesn’t: verbatim replicas of copyrighted material. It’s just the latest in a series of suits from copyright owners concerned that OpenAI is profiting off their protected content by feeding it into large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, that could potentially set new limits around this technology.
OpenAI, founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and seven others, has—like any self-respecting Silicon Valley startup—been rocked by infighting in recent months. But its pioneering AI chatbot—ChatGPT, released in December 2022—has …
As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our full 1,633-word story on newspapers’ recent lawsuit against OpenAI is available in the members-only version of TMD.
Worth Your Time
- “Donald Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: He was too nice,” Time Magazine’s Eric Cortellessa wrote of his recent interview with the former president, in which Trump reveals what he wants a second term to look like. “Trump has sought to recast an insurrectionist riot as an act of patriotism,” Cortellessa wrote. “‘I call them the J-6 patriots,’ he says. When I ask whether he would consider pardoning every one of them, he says, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ Trump has also vowed to appoint a ‘real special prosecutor’ to go after Biden. ‘I wouldn’t want to hurt Biden,’ he tells me. ‘I have too much respect for the office.’ Seconds later, though, he suggests Biden’s fate may be tied to an upcoming Supreme Court ruling on whether Presidents can face criminal prosecution for acts committed in office. ‘If they said that a President doesn’t get immunity,’ says Trump, ‘then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.’” Perhaps most concerningly, Cortellessa writes: “Trump does not dismiss the possibility of political violence around the election. ‘If we don’t win, you know, it depends,’ he tells TIME.”
Presented Without Comment
At a press conference in front of the occupied academic building at Columbia University:
Reporter: “Why should the university be obligated to provide food to people who’ve taken over a building?”
Student protester: “To allow it to be brought in. Well, I mean, I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic—I mean it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?”
Reporter: “But they did put themselves in that, very deliberately in that situation, in that position, so it seems like you’re saying, ‘We want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over the building, now would you please bring us some food and water.’”
In the Zeitgeist
Matt “Tugboat” Wilkinson—a 10th-round draft pick from Central Arizona College—is taking the minor league baseball world by storm, pitching six hitless innings in a game last week that dropped his earned run average for the season down to a sterling 0.44. Tug, as his friends call him, has only given up six hits in his first four starts.
Toeing the Company Line
- How will the TikTok ban play out? What’s going on with the Methodists? Is the RNC’s ground game in trouble? Will and Kevin were joined by Alex Reinauer, Mark Tooley, Drucker, and John to discuss all that and more on last night’s Dispatch Live (🔒). Members who missed the conversation can catch a rerun—either video or audio-only—by clicking here.
- In the newsletters: Nick wondered (🔒) whether the campus protests will ultimately serve to put Trump back in the White House.
- On the podcasts: Jonah and Sarah discuss subtweets and Trump’s immunity case on The Remnant, while Jonah joins the Road to Now podcast for an episode Dispatch listeners can also check out on The Skiff (🔒).
- On the site: Alison Somin explores how competitive K-12 schools are still getting away with race-based admission policies and Jonah argues that today’s college protests are the product of 1960s radicalism nostalgia.
