Former national security adviser John Bolton criticized Trump’s pick for counter-terrorism chief, Sebastian Gorka, calling him a ‘conman’ and unfit for the role.
The Israeli-Moldovan national went missing on Thursday, sparking a Mossad investigation.
Operation Car Wash, which started in Brazil, revealed a bribery scheme that spanned at least 12 countries. Brazil’s Supreme Court has reversed much of its impact.
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Earlier this week, The Atlantic published a new investigation by Alex Reisner into the data that are being used without permission to train generative-AI programs. In this case, dialogue from tens of thousands of movies and TV shows has been harvested by companies such as Apple, Anthropic, Meta, and Nvidia to develop large language models (or LLMs).
The data have a strange provenance: Rather than being pulled from scripts or books, the dialogue is taken from subtitle files that have been extracted from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and internet streams. “Though this may seem like a strange source for AI-training data, subtitles are valuable because they’re a raw form of written dialogue,” Reisner writes. “They contain the rhythms and styles of spoken conversation and allow tech companies to expand generative AI’s repertoire beyond academic texts, journalism, and novels, all of which have also been used to train these programs.”
Perhaps it no longer comes as a major shock that creative humans are having their work ripped off to train machines that threaten to replace them. But evidence demonstrating exactly what data have been used, and for what purposes, is hard to come by, thanks to the secretive nature of these tech companies. “Now, at least, we know a bit more about who is caught in the machinery,” Reisner writes. “What will the world decide they are owed?”
There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI
By Alex Reisner
For as long as generative-AI chatbots have been on the internet, Hollywood writers have wondered if their work has been used to train them. The chatbots are remarkably fluent with movie references, and companies seem to be training them on all available sources. One screenwriter recently told me he’s seen generative AI reproduce close imitations of The Godfather and the 1980s TV show Alf, but he had no way to prove that a program had been trained on such material.
I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. Not just on The Godfather and Alf, but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies. I recently downloaded this data set, which I saw referenced in papers about the development of various large language models (or LLMs). It includes writing from every film nominated for Best Picture from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. It even includes prewritten “live” dialogue from Golden Globes and Academy Awards broadcasts. If a chatbot can mimic a crime-show mobster or a sitcom alien—or, more pressingly, if it can piece together whole shows that might otherwise require a room of writers—data like this are part of the reason why.
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The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Feb. 26 in a case involving the showing that plaintiffs in “reverse discrimination” cases must make, followed by oral arguments on March 4 in a lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against U.S. gun manufacturers, seeking to hold them liable for gun violence in Mexico.
The court on Friday morning released the calendar for its February argument session , which begins on Feb. 24 and continues through Mar. 5. During that time, the justices will hear eight hours of argument over six days.
Here is a full list of the cases set for argument during the February argument session:
Gutierrez v. Saenz (Feb. 24): Whether a Texas man on death row has a legal right to sue, known as standing, to challenge the state law governing postconviction DNA testing.
Esteras v. United States (Feb. 25): Whether, in considering whether to revoke an individual’s supervised release and impose a prison sentence, a court may consider factors from the law governing sentencing that the supervised release law does not mention.
Perttu v. Richards (Feb. 25): Whether, in cases subject to the Prison Litigation Reform Act, prisoners have a right to a jury trial concerning their exhaustion of administrative remedies where disputed facts regarding exhaustion are intertwined with the underlying merits of their claims.
Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services (Feb. 26): Whether, in addition to pleading the other elements of a federal employment discrimination claim, a plaintiff in a reverse discrimination case – here, a heterosexual woman alleging that she was the victim of discrimination based on her sexual orientation – must also show “background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”
CC/Devas Ltd. v. Antrix Corp. (consolidated for one hour of oral argument with Devas Multimedia Private Ltd. v. Antrix Corp. ) (Mar. 3): Whether plaintiffs must prove minimum contacts before federal courts can assert personal jurisdiction over foreign states sued under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
Blom Bank Sal v. Honickman (Mar. 3): Whether the stringent standard of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(6), requiring the showing of extraordinary circumstances to justify the reopening of a final judgment, applies to a post-judgment request to vacate a judgment so that an amended complaint can be filed.
Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unios Mexicanos (Mar. 4): Whether a lawsuit by the Mexican government against U.S. gun manufacturers, arguing that they had aided and abetted the illegal sales of guns to traffickers for cartels in Mexico, should go forward.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission v. Texas (with Interim Storage Partners v. Texas ) (Mar. 5): Whether the Hobbs Act, which allows a “party aggrieved” by an agency’s “final order” to seek review in a federal court of appeals, authorizes nonparties to obtain review of claims asserting that an agency order exceeds the agency’s statutory power; and whether the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 permit the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license private entities to temporarily store nuclear fuel away from the nuclear-reactor sites where the spent fuel was generated.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court .
The post Justices schedule Mexico’s suit against US gun manufacturers appeared first on SCOTUSblog .
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene will chair a new subcommittee aimed at eliminating government waste under the newly formed “Department of Government Efficiency.”
From dance performances to gate runways, these passengers are making the most of their time at the airport during holiday travel!
Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, the former Army National Guard major and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has no clear policy or management experience that qualifies him to run the Pentagon. What he has instead is a reactionary streak—one that’s evident in his view that women should no longer have combat roles in the military. In his recent book The War on Warriors, he implies that women service members who have received military honors for their bravery were decorated because of “an agenda .”
These comments reflect a broader tendency among Trump and his allies to treat every evolution in social norms as a triumph of “wokeness”—a DEI project gone awry. Having women in combat roles “hasn’t made us more effective,” Hegseth said in an appearance on the podcast the Shawn Ryan Show earlier this month. It “hasn’t made us more lethal.” Hegseth seemed to suggest that women and men cannot behave professionally alongside each other. “Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated,” he said. “And complication in combat means casualties are worse.”
Hegseth’s nomination may be in jeopardy following revelations that he paid a legal settlement to a woman who’d accused him of sexually assaulting her at a conference in Monterey, California. (Hegseth has said their interaction was consensual. Local police investigated the incident at the behest of an emergency-room nurse who’d treated the alleged victim, but no charges were filed.) After Trump announced his surprise pick, supporters of women in the military were quick to criticize Hegseth’s views, albeit without naming him. In an interview with NBC News, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin repeated a well-worn defense of gender diversity : that women “make us stronger.” Mark Milley , who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, was more emphatic. “Don’t lecture me about women in combat,” Milley said at an event Wednesday. “Women have been in combat … No one gives a shit if it’s a woman or a guy to pull that trigger; you’re still dead.”
[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick ]
Yet even these well-meaning defenses of female service members’ equality sounded incomplete—like what you might expect to hear when men argue over what women can do. If the talking points are rusty, perhaps that’s because the role of women in combat hasn’t been much in the news since the final restriction was lifted in 2013 . By 2012, when President Barack Obama began to consider a formal rule change, more than 130 women had died in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though they technically had not been in combat. This is because women were excluded from combat roles such as artillery and close battle, but that distinction was becoming harder to maintain as the nature of warfare changed. The Pentagon had been slowly placing women in more dangerous roles in order to address staffing needs , even allowing them onto submarines. But the military still upheld a long-standing prohibition against deploying women for “direct ground combat,” or DGC.
[Jackie Munn: I felt more welcome in combat than I did on base ]
As the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars dragged on, the Pentagon was ultimately reduced to semantic games that downplayed women’s roles, assigning them to combat troops but insisting, in accordance with DGC restrictions, that they were not waging war. The most absurd example involved the Marine Corps, which launched so-called female engagement teams to patrol among, make contact with, and gather intelligence from civilians in Muslim countries where strict cultural rules prohibit interactions between women and men. The female teams were deployed with Marine Expeditionary Units, assigned to be with or attached to combat units but technically not in combat.
The Pentagon ended up changing the DGC prohibitions because they were no longer sustainable for military purposes. Men with higher ranks and much greater responsibility than Hegseth long ago recognized that ending combat exclusion wasn’t primarily a matter of women’s equality, but of military readiness. Besides, the distinction between combat and noncombat roles had begun to vanish. As one Army official observed in 2012, in a “nonlinear battlefield, there are no safe jobs.”
Up to now, efforts to reverse the Obama-era rule change have been quite limited, not least because women’s presence in the military hasn’t been terribly revolutionary in practice. Physical-fitness requirements continue to be rigorous. The Associated Press reported this week that only about 4,800 women are currently qualified for Army infantry, armor, and artillery jobs. The standard still demanded of the most elite combat roles means that the Navy’s Special Warfare combat crew has only two women and the Air Force’s special-operations team has three.
The numbers don’t seem to matter to a nominee who has built his reputation on a broad sense of grievance and on claims that the military is putting DEI concerns first. “The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is ‘Our diversity is our strength,’” he said on The Shawn Ryan Show. How much Trump agrees with Hegseth isn’t entirely clear, although the president-elect has complained about “woke generals ” in the past. Unfortunately, that kind of rhetoric takes little account of what’s really going on: The military’s rules have changed to catch up with how military personnel operate in the real world, even if it annoys culture warriors on Fox News.
Óscar Sánchez Gil, Chief Inspector of Spain’s Economic and Tax Crimes Unit, has been arrested for drug trafficking