Many reputable critics have heralded The New York Times as the newsiest newspaper of all time.

But what if America’s preeminent publication isn’t telling us the full story?

The NYT is currently embroiled in a lawsuit against OpenAI, the founder of ChatGPT, and this case could set a precedent that changes everything.

Espresso Shots

☕️ Genesis Settles 😳

Genesis Global Trading has settled with the New York Department of Financial Services.

The case was regarding Genesis’s failures to comply with New York State anti-money laundering and cybersecurity programs.

Genesis, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, will have to pay an $8 million fine and surrender its Bitlicense, New York’s business license for virtual currency providers.

Now that Genesis has this settled, we’d really like an explanation as to how Noah kept all those animals from eating each other.

☕️ Warren Fires Off Against ETFs 🤬

Senator Elizabeth Warren took to X to voice her displeasure with the SEC’s decision to approve eleven Bitcoin Spot ETFs.

Despite Warren’s misgivings, the Bitcoin Spot ETFs generated $4 billion in volume on their first day of trading.

Also being “wrong on the law” is the accusation thrown around by dyslexic prosecutors, everywhere.

Spilling the Beans

Chat NYT 💻

The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Why?

Because the New York Times believes that OpenAI was training their chatbots using material from the New York Times without the organization’s consent.

Within the lawsuit, the New York Times emphasized that this sort of wonton theft of journalistic materials stands not only as a threat to the NYT but to the very definition of journalism and intellectual ownership.

But how did the NYT come to the conclusion that materials had been stolen and fed to ChatGPT as part of its learning process?

By asking it.

When prompted with specific questions, ChatGPT regurgitated specific, copyrighted content that appeared to have been lifted directly from The New York Times.

But how does OpenAI respond to these allegations?

Though OpenAI recognizes the New York Times’ indelible contributions to both journalism and the modern definition of free speech, OpenAI feels that "the New York Times is not telling the full story." As reported in a conversation with Decrypt.

OpenAI takes umbrage with the manner in which the NYT was able to pull these responses from ChatGPT.

“It seems they intentionally manipulated prompts, often including lengthy excerpts of articles, in order to get our model to regurgitate,” said OpenAI.

“Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way the New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts.”

Fair point, but it’s problematic that this copyrighted language would appear in ChatGPT to begin with, but that argument begins to blend into an even larger discussion of intellectual ownership, one that we’re still exploring when it comes to AI.

But you may be wondering, what does all of this have to do with crypto?

Well, like it or not, crypto and AI have become inexorably linked.

With the prevalence of AI tokens as well as AI tradebots, for better or worse, crypto and AI will have to lean on each other as they trudge forward through the murky waters of the public consciousness.

That’s what makes these questions of ownership so important. To make artificial intelligence… intelligent, it has to learn.

But which depositories of knowledge are off-limits? Plenty of AI have learned language using the Bible, but they’re not being struck down by God.

And if we follow this rhetoric, should we all be paying royalties to Scholastic every time we do a little mental math, just because we learned it from a Scholastic textbook in elementary school?

The answers to these problems aren’t clear, frankly, because we’ve never had to ask them before.

And that’s what makes this such a landmark case. We’re deadly curious to discover who’s legally in the wrong here.

Is OpenAI brazenly ripping off the work of hardworking writers and editors? Or does the New York Times see AI through an outdated, overly proprietary lens?

One thing’s for sure, these two will have to work together if they’re ever going to develop an AI capable of writing a mindbendingly difficult, weekly crossword.

The Last Sip

We have to quietly whisper thanks that Open AI (allegedly) used The New York Times for their chatbot instead of The New Yorker. 

I don’t want to live in a world where a robot can produce erudite and desert-dry, single-panel cartoons.

Stay Caffeinated,

Coffee & Crypto Team

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