The Atlantic

When Meta started developing its flagship AI model, employees faced an ethical question, Alex Reisner writes. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT. Should they just pirate it? According to court records, one employee said in internal company chats that licensing all the material would be "unreasonably expensive,” and another noted that licensing would be “incredibly slow.” Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use Library Genesis, or LibGen, a pirated library of more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers, Reisner reports. This is part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past. “Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s ‘fair use’ to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs ‘transform’ the original material into new work,” Reisener writes. But the use of LibGen raises another issue: “Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law.” Works in LibGen include recent literature and nonfiction by prominent authors such as Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, and Hua Hsu. Publishers have tried to stop the circulation of pirated material, but “authorities have been largely unable to constrain the spread of these libraries online. Seventeen years after its creation, LibGen continues to grow,” Reisner reports. “Until now, most people have had no window into the contents of this library, even though they have likely been exposed to generative-AI products that use it,” Reisener writes. To show the kind of work that has been used by Meta and OpenAI, Reisner created an interactive database that reveals the contents of the library without distributing the books or research papers themselves. Read more and search Reisner’s database: https://lnkd.in/ePPFfFw7 🎨: Matteo Giuseppe Pani

Donald Trump doesn’t need to destroy the court system to get his way, Aziz Huq writes. He just needs to create a shadow zone where the law no longer applies. Welcome to America’s “prerogative state”:

Andrew Cuomo is resurgent, Gavin Newsom is podcasting, and Rahm Emanuel is considering a presidential run. Are these the bullies Democrats need? Gal Beckerman asks. https://lnkd.in/eS7hmMSh A new NBC survey found that 65 percent of Democrats want their lawmakers to oppose Donald Trump even if it leads to gridlock, compared with 32 percent who are willing to broach some compromise. “Toughness, as a value, has long been a fixture in American politics—but it has been inescapable since 2016,” Beckerman notes. “In interview after interview following the latest election, voters told reporters that Trump’s pumping fist, raised seconds after July’s assassination attempt, sealed the deal for them.” But Beckerman questions whether toughness will work for candidates who merely attempt to mirror Trump’s modus operandi. “Democrats seem to have less patience for the kind of shamelessness and blame-shifting that are the president’s trademark. Emanuel and Cuomo are on the comeback trail precisely because they have already offended Democratic voters through Trumpian behavior,” Beckerman writes. As for Newsom, “in a much-mocked effort to show his ability to cut it in the manosphere, he has been hosting a podcast and has brought on right-wing figures including Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon as guests.” “Democrats would be better off finding their own model of toughness—not one that extols aggression and strong-arming,” Beckerman writes. “Maybe they should channel, as the Democratic strategist James Carville suggested, the fighting technique of the older Muhammad Ali … Absorb punches until Trump tires himself out or, more likely, the American people get tired of all the chaos and disruption.” Or maybe the way forward is “to put out a barrage of creative ideas, to flood the zone with stuff that will inevitably be better than anything Trump or Musk has to offer. Democrats believe in government, so they tend to govern better,” Beckerman continues. “Maybe what’s called for is a shadow Cabinet, like those organized by British opposition parties, with the Democrats demonstrating, day after day, what they could do if they were in charge.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eS7hmMSh 🎨:The Atlantic / Getty

In the Atlantic Daily, Vann R. Newkirk II revisits the 1925 Klu Klux Klan march in Washington, D.C., through the eyes of Black newspapers:

A tiny French village became an ALS hot spot. Neurologists found that the patients consistently ate three foods: game, dandelion greens, and, notably, wild mushrooms. Shayla Love traveled there to investigate:

The U.S. has neglected its public-health infrastructure in recent years. Now, the Trump administration is actively destroying it, Katherine J. Wu writes:

Many people roll their 20s through a sugar coating of nostalgia, Rainesford Stauffer wrote in 2021. But framing young adulthood as the best time of life is a little grim, as it puts a limit on growth. https://lnkd.in/eVAHGAMz ⁠ This glorification of youth seems to assume that everyone has the same resources; moves on the same timeline, in the same way; and has the same kind of life, one filled with adventure and experimentation, Stauffer explained. Your 20s are “supposed to simultaneously be a golden age of rootless freedom and fearless exploration and, somewhat contradictorily, the time when you’re meant to figure out your career, your relationships, and your life goals. That’s a lot of pressure.”⁠ ⁠ To uncover what young adulthood really looks like, Stauffer spoke with several 20-somethings from different backgrounds and in all sorts of circumstances to learn how they understand this time in their life. “The young adults I talked with didn’t articulate far-flung fantasies of a #bestlife as Instagram illustrates it. They described a desire to simply feel like enough. They wanted more nuanced conversations about what making your way in the world as a young adult actually means,” Stauffer continued. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eVAHGAMz 📸: Jonathan Knowles / Getty

A new Broadway production of “Othello” foregrounds what its earliest audiences recognized: the costs of war. Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, a consultant on the project, shares what the playwright got right about PTSD:

In addition to being an environmentally preferable alternative to cars, e-bikes are a proven source of joy. But the machines aren’t for everybody, Isabel Fattal writes in the Wonder Reader:

“Over the past few decades, the credit-card market has quietly transformed into two credit-card markets: one offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans, the other offering expensive debt to the poor, with the latter subsidizing the former,” Annie Lowrey writes: https://lnkd.in/eh5xD3Cq “In the credit-card industry, the well-to-do are known as transactors. They pay off their balance in full every month, avoiding late fees and interest charges,” Lowrey continues. They use credit cards as a convenient payment method, and as a way to earn points. Given how valuable—and untaxed—these rewards are, transactors make money by spending money. “In contrast, the have-nots are known as revolvers. Revolvers are subprime borrowers who use credit cards as a payment tool and as a short-term loan, to cover surprise expenses and groceries the week before payday.” To cover “swipe” fees that credit-card companies charge, merchants hike up retail prices. Poorer families—who disproportionately pay with debit cards and cash—shoulder much of the burden, while transactors get juicy perks for using cards. Additionally, transactors benefit from the late fees and interest charges accumulated by revolvers, which credit-card companies use to help finance their rewards programs. American consumers have been charging more and more to their cards. Credit-card balances stand at an all-time high, and the share of borrowers who are late on their payments has reached its highest point since the aftermath of the Great Recession. “A strong economy with a brutal cost-of-living crisis is a great economy for the credit-card industry, it turns out,” Lowrey writes. “The revenue credit-card firms make from interest payments has ballooned from $76 billion in 2020 to $170 billion in 2024.” But a slowing economy is beginning to affect even the transactors. And “with markets swooning, card companies are offering fewer cards to subprime borrowers,” Lowrey continues at the link in our bio. “Relying on expensive debt, and paying fees that subsidize richer card users, is bad enough for poor Americans. Not having a credit card to fall back on might be worse.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eh5xD3Cq 🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Getty.