A Manhattan judge has ordered OpenAI to provide the Pioneer Press and other news outlets with millions of anonymous chats between ChatGPT and its users in a major ongoing copyright infringement case.

In a nine-page order made public Wednesday, Manhattan Magistrate Judge Ona Wang denied OpenAI’s request to reconsider her November ruling requiring the tech giant to hand over 20 million ChatGPT output logs to the media outlets.

The newspapers want to analyze a sample of ChatGPT’s consumer logs to test its language-learning model to see whether and how it’s propagating journalists’ work.

The ruling comes in a major consolidated class-action lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI initiated in 2023, in which The New York Times and news outlets affiliated with Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group allege the artificial intelligence company is stealing and distorting their copyrighted works. The Authors Guild and a litany of best-selling writers are also parties in the complex litigation.

“OpenAI’s leadership was hallucinating when they thought they could get away with withholding evidence about how their business model relies on stealing from hardworking journalists, and we look forward to holding them accountable for their ongoing misappropriation of our work. They should pay for the copyright-protected work they use to build and maintain their apps and products, and they know it,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, in a statement.

Spokespeople and lawyers for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but a spokesman for Open AI pointed Reuters to a company blog post that said the request to turn over the chats “disregards long-standing privacy protections” and “breaks with common-sense security practices.”

But in the decision, Wang reaffirmed that users’ privacy was not in jeopardy, noting that OpenAI had almost completed an internal process to anonymize the chats. Also mitigating privacy risks raised by OpenAI are the “multiple layers of protection in this case precisely because of the highly sensitive and private nature of much of the discovery that is exchanging hands,” the judge wrote.

She found the A.I. conversations were “clearly relevant” to the news outlets’ claims that they contain partial or complete reproductions of their copyrighted works and to OpenAI’s defense that they contain other user activity.

“News Plaintiffs are entitled to discovery on both,” the judge wrote.

“Production of the 20 Million ChatGPT Logs is also proportional to the needs of the case. The total universe of retained consumer output logs is in the tens of billions. The 20 million sample here represents less than 0.05% of the total logs that OpenAI has retained in the ordinary course of business.”

Wang wrote that once the tech behemoth has completed the deidentification process, it will have 7 days to hand over the data. OpenAI has also appealed Wang’s November order to Manhattan Federal Judge Sidney Stein, the district judge overseeing the case.

The sizable 20 million chats represent a fraction of the billions of output logs ChatGPT has retained, Wang noted in her Wednesday order.

Steven Lieberman, an attorney for MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, in a statement pointed to Wang’s finding that OpenAI had withheld “critically important evidence” when it was first requested and rejected the tech giant’s arguments to the contrary.

“The Court also raised the issue of whether OpenAI’s efforts to delay production of the ChatGPT logs was motivated by an improper purpose, saying of the two possible explanations for OpenAI’s behavior: [n]either bode well for OpenAI.”

When the longest government shutdown in U.S. history ended recently, Republicans mostly got what they wanted: A spending bill was passed, the government was reopened and Democrats’ main demand — a deal to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies — was deferred. Now Republicans must deliver on a health care compromise, lest millions of Americans get stuck with big bills come January.

At issue is the expiration of COVID-era benefits for Affordable Care Act enrollees. When the ACA passed in 2010, lawmakers included a provision that would help reduce monthly costs: subsidized premiums for beneficiaries earning less than 400% of the federal poverty level (about $45,000 at the time). During the pandemic, Congress increased such assistance and expanded it to higher earners. The Inflation Reduction Act extended those changes until Dec. 31.

Letting the enhanced subsidies expire will be disruptive. On average, enrollees’ out-of-pocket premiums will double. Older, relatively higher earners will be among the hardest hit. According to one analysis, premiums for a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 would climb by $1,883 a month, or $22,600 annually. While lower earners may see milder increases — monthly payments could rise to, say, $15 from zero — experts worry that higher premiums will push healthier people to drop coverage, further increasing costs for those who stay enrolled. Perhaps 4 million people will become uninsured.

Neither party wants to see that happen, least of all before midterm elections next year. Yet extending the subsidies permanently as Democrats wish — at $350 billion over a decade — is likely a nonstarter. Beyond the large sum, critics object to the flow of payments, which go straight to insurers. With taxpayers footing the bill, health plans have done little to contain costs. Consider that premiums on ACA exchanges have risen almost twice as fast as the employer-based market since 2014. A temporary extension, as the White House appears to support, would do little to resolve this.

Ideally, any compromise would soften the shock of lost subsidies while slowing the growth of federal spending. The first is best achieved by eliminating the subsidy cutoff at 400% of the poverty line. Economists have long disliked benefits cliffs, which penalize work and higher pay, and the cost of eliminating the threshold would be relatively modest. (Expenditures per enrollee shrink as incomes rise.) Lawmakers could offset the additional spending by increasing enrollees’ share of premiums for the highest earners — lowered to 8.5% of household income during the pandemic — while restoring assistance for lower earners to pre-COVID levels.

Republicans haven’t been notably serious about health care in recent years, but some reasonable proposals are emerging. One would direct funds previously earmarked for insurers into tax-advantaged health-savings accounts. Once consumers gain control over their dollars, the thinking goes, insurers would be forced to compete for their business and lower costs. As currently envisioned, the idea will be difficult to implement before the deadline. It’s also too narrow, applying only to ACA plans with the lowest premiums and highest deductibles. But a revised version that ensured funds can be used more liberally would be a step in the right direction.

Beyond the immediate negotiations, lawmakers should be thinking bigger about how to restrain costs. Paramount should be giving consumers more choice, including those in the much larger employer-sponsored market. Gradually allowing more flexibility to pick a health plan — be it short-term coverage or a public option — should increase competition and improve care without destabilizing the market. A program that’s easily executed and avoids immediate disruption (such as eliminating the cliff) might be supplemented with such reforms in the future.

For now, a bipartisan agreement that extends and reforms subsidies would be the right thing for taxpayers and enrollees alike. Without a longer-term plan, though, America’s soaring health care costs threaten to become one more crisis in the making.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

The significant fact about Ukraine’s corruption scandal is that it is having one. A scandal, that is, as opposed to just a fact of life.

Last month an investigation led by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency, accused allies of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including two ministers, of graft and fraud to the tune of $100 million. The ministers have resigned. So has the president’s chief of staff, while a former business partner of Zelenskyy appears to have fled the country. The president himself is not accused of wrongdoing but has been politically damaged.

Corruption has always been what’s wrong with Ukraine. The investigation, and the legal and political accountability that have gone with it, is what’s right. A nation that can investigate its leaders even as it fights for its existence is one worth defending.

That’s the thought that should animate anyone not part of the peace-at-any-price wing of the Trump administration, whose leading lights, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were in Moscow on Tuesday for personal talks with Vladimir Putin. The two real-estate developers were previously the authors, with Putin negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, of a 28-point plan devised in Miami that amounted to a Ukraine surrender document; the thinking behind it, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week, was even scarier.

“For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity,” the Journal noted. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe — while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”

What’s wrong with this thinking? To adapt Winston Churchill’s line about Russia — “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” — the notion of peace through business is self-dealing wrapped in self-delusion inside self-harm.

History refutes it: Britain and Germany were major trading partners on the eve of World War I; economic ties between China and the West have grown as Beijing has become more truculent. Experience with Putin’s Russia refutes it: One Western company after another got burned — or worse — doing business in Russia in the era when the Kremlin supposedly welcomed foreign investment.

And common sense refutes it. If Putin were interested in peace and prosperity between Russia and the West, he would have pursued both over his quarter-century in power. But Putin does not want coexistence. He wants dominance, even at the cost of the 1 million casualties his forces have reportedly suffered so far. His role models aren’t Bill Gates or Konrad Adenauer. They’re Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible.

That’s not going to change. Putin is 73, sees himself as a world-historical figure and has thus far mainly succeeded in getting his way against adversaries he despises as weak, vain and corruptible. By sending two developers to negotiate with him, President Donald Trump merely ratified Putin’s attitude.

The significant danger now is that Putin will agree, conditionally, to some sort of Trump-endorsed “peace plan,” putting unbearable diplomatic pressure on Kyiv to accept it. Among other effects, this will fracture Ukrainian politics, fracture the NATO alliance, rescue Russia’s economy, strengthen pro-Russian voices in European politics and give Russia time to recover its military strength. In exchange, Ukraine will get the kind of paper promises it got back in 1994, when it gave up its nuclear weapons for nonbinding security guarantees — another reminder that disarmament is as often a road to war as it is to peace.

A question for Marco Rubio: How good will U.S. security guarantees for Kyiv be in 2029, when he’s a private citizen, JD Vance is president and Putin is hungry again for another choice cut of Ukraine?

There’s always the chance that Putin will overplay his hand, once again giving Trump the feeling that the Russian is “tapping us along,” as he put it in May, and reviving the administration’s appetite to defend Ukraine. Besides being the right thing to do, it would signal to China that the administration will not bargain away the independence of Taiwan for the sake of lucrative business opportunities for the Trump family and its friends.

Zelenskyy and his remaining supporters in Europe shouldn’t count on it. They may soon have to make a terrible choice between grasping for a temporary peace or continuing to suffer through a punishing war. Far be it for a columnist writing from the safety of New York to offer his advice, but another line from Churchill is worth recalling: “Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.”

The larger warning here is for free nations everywhere, particularly in Europe. The era of Pax Americana may soon be drawing to a close. From then on it will be every region, or country, for itself, against emboldened and avaricious adversaries. For a sense of how to fight, look no further than the Ukrainians whom we abandon at our peril and to our shame.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

 

By ADRIAN SAINZ, Associated Press

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Steve Cropper, the lean, soulful guitarist and songwriter who helped anchor the celebrated Memphis backing band Booker T. and the M.G.’s at Stax Records and co-wrote the classics “Green Onions,” “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” and “In the Midnight Hour,” has died. He was 84.

Pat Mitchell Worley, president and CEO of the Soulsville Foundation, said Cropper’s family told her that Cropper died on Wednesday in Nashville. The foundation operates the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, located at the site of the former Stax Records, where Cropper worked for years.

Related Articles

Safety volunteer charged in the fatal shooting of a Utah ‘No Kings’ protester

Wisconsin Supreme Court to decide whether local jails can hold immigrants for ICE

4 Republican states will help Homeland Security obtain driver’s license records

Kids and teens go full throttle for E-bikes as federal oversight stalls

Payrolls at US companies fall by most since 2023, ADP says

The guitarist, songwriter and record producer was not known for flashy playing, but his spare, catchy licks and solid rhythm chops helped define Memphis soul music. His very name was immortalized in the 1967 smash “Soul Man,” recorded by Sam & Dave. Midway, singer Sam Moore calls out “Play it, Steve!” as Cropper pulls off a characteristically tight, ringing riff, a slide sound that Cropper used a Zippo lighter to create. The exchange was reenacted in the late 1970s when Cropper joined the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd act “The Blues Brothers” and played on their hit cover of “Soul Man.”

Cropper was born near Dora, Missouri, but moved with his family to Memphis when he was 9 and got his first mail-order guitar at age 14, according to his website, playitsteve.com. Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed and Chet Atkins were among his early influences.

Cropper was a Stax artist before the label was even called Stax, which Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton had founded as Satellite Records in 1957. In the early 1960s, Satellite signed up Cropper and his instrumental band the Royals Spades. The band soon changed its name to the Mar-Keys and had a hit with the funky “Last Night.” Satellite soon was renamed Stax; a California label with the same name had threatened legal action.

At Stax, some of the Mar-Keys became the label’s horn section while Cropper and other Mar-Keys eventually formed Booker T. and the MG’s. Featuring Cropper, keyboard player Booker T. Jones, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn and drummer Al Jackson, Booker T. and the M.G.’s were known for their hit instrumentals “Green Onions,” “Hang ‘Em High” and “Time Is Tight,” and backed Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and other artists. The racially integrated band, a rarity in its day, was so admired that even non-Stax artists recorded with them, notably Wilson Pickett.

In the mid-1960s, Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler brought Pickett to Memphis to work with the Stax musicians. During a 2015 gathering with the National Music Publishers Association, Cropper acknowledged he had never heard of Pickett before working with him. He found some gospel recordings by Pickett, was taken by the line “I’ll see my Jesus in the midnight hour” and with a slight change helped write a secular standard.

“The man up there has been forgiving me for this ever since!” he said.

Cropper was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 as a member of Booker T. and the M.G.’s. The same year, Cropper, Dunn and Jones were part of the house band for an all-star tribute at Madison Square Garden to Bob Dylan, with other performers including Neil Young, George Harrison and Stevie Wonder. (Al Jackson died in 1975, Dunn in 2012).

Rolling Stone magazine ranked Cropper 39th on its 100 Greatest Guitarists list, calling him “the secret ingredient in some of the greatest rock and soul songs.”

He played guitar on hits by Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett and many others, but was especially close to Redding. In an interview on his website, Cropper recalled collaborating on “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” completed shortly before Redding’s death in a December 1967 plane crash and a No. 1 hit in 1968.

The brooding, folkish ballad was a departure from Redding’s signature soul sound and a bittersweet reflection on his triumphant appearance a few months earlier at the Monterey Pop Festival. Cropper would remember adding the final touches on the recording while still grieving for Redding.

“We had been looking for the crossover song,” he said. “This song, we knew we had it.”

Cropper was in the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers” and its follow-up, “Blues Brothers 2000,” portraying “The Colonel” in the Blues Brothers band. In real life, he toured with them.

He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 in New York City, and two years later received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.