The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

ROGUE QUEEN: Chess star Magnus Carlsen won the new Freestyle Chess tournament that he co-founded. The fast-growing chess variation uses nontraditional rules and tries to channel the vibe of a New American restaurant that does things a little differently around here.

ISO FORMER STAR: Cate Blanchett revealed in an interview that she’s serious about eventually quitting acting, saying she has other things she wants to do with her life. There goes another one to pickleball.

Personal

BOT BUREAUCRACY: Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is running for mayor of NYC and is using AI to address the city’s housing problems. Cuomo reportedly used ChatGPT to write his housing plans, and online detectives found out by the fact that ChatGPT is cited at the end of the plan.

CALL MOM: Or get an AI service that will do it for you and then give you a summary telling you if your parents were in a bad mood. The only catch is that it will always agree to come home for a long weekend.

For Sale

TOTALLY LEGAL CACTI: A well-known cactus collector is at the center of a potentially illicit plant heist. The whole story is a little dry, though.

VEGAS TRIP: Some people hoping to be put into a human hamster wheel full of gravy traveled to Las Vegas for a three-day MrBeast experience. Unfortunately, it turned out they paid $1,000 for some chocolate bars, an empty schedule, and no MrBeast—leading to outrage and calls for refunds. The worst part? The only t-shirts available were XS or XL…not a single medium in sight.—MM

NBA teams should want no part of shooting free throws during the playoffs at the Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers. Opponents shot 74.8% from the foul line there this season, the second-worst mark in the league, and, per Sportico, 73.4% when looking toward The Wall—a special fan section behind one of the hoops with unusually steep seating that’s 51 rows high.

That section is the brainchild of Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who wanted to create a tangible home-court advantage. Only diehard fans of the home team are allowed in that area, and there’s an expectation they will stand for the entire game. The free-throw percentage of shots taken in front of the wall was 4.7% below the league average this season—only one home arena was further below the average since 2000, when both ends of the court in Oklahoma City saw visitors shoot just 69.8% from the foul line in 2014. That was a staggering 5.8% below the league average, possibly because opponents were expending energy trying to convince Kevin Durant to leave the Thunder.—DL

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even fly on a water taxi.

Fast, clean, and airborne ferries set to launch worldwide. See water taxi fly: A battery-powered ferry in Stockholm uses hydrofoil underwater wings to skate through currents at 30 mph, twice the speed of a typical US ferry, while producing only 2% of the carbon emissions. Its battery holds the power of about three Tesla Cybertrucks. Shipbuilder Candela has struck deals with ferry operators to bring its electric vessels to Lake Tahoe, Berlin, and Saudi Arabia’s planned city, Neom. Candela’s CEO has also floated his interest in New York City, San Francisco, and Mumbai. Electric ferries have gained popularity along coastal regions in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia amid efforts to improve local air quality and save gas money.

Sea turtles may be recovering from endangerment. Shoutout to Miley Cyrus guarding the eggs on the beach in The Last Song. Sea turtle populations in more than half of the world are showing signs of recovery from threats including hunting, pollution, and coastal development, according to a new study of 48 groups of sea turtles. “The sea turtle story is one of the real conservation success stories,” an ecologist not involved with the study said. Policy changes from decades ago that banned sea turtle poaching in the US and Mexico are finally being reflected in population rebounds, aided by community efforts to protect nests and limit turtles’ encounters with fishing boats, the researchers said. Some species, like green turtles, are faring better than others, like leatherbacks.

Lab-grown nuggets could hit stores in five years. Chicken may not grow on trees, but it certainly grows in laboratories: Researchers at the University of Tokyo grew nugget-sized chunks of poultry by feeding nutrients and oxygen to chicken muscle cells through strawlike microfibers, which they say overcomes a big obstacle on the road to quality lab-grown meat. For the most part, scientists have struggled to grow more than pellet-sized bits of meat, which makes this a significant step toward growing chicken cutlets and other whole pieces of fish and beef, the researchers said. The Tokyo team’s lab-grown chicken nuggets could be commercially available in five to 10 years, though likely at a premium compared to regular poultry.—ML

The app that serves up hot takes on how to fix the world recently got one from its founding father. Twitter (now X) founder Jack Dorsey posted pithily: “delete all IP law,” to which the app’s stepfather, Elon Musk, replied with even greater brevity: “I agree.”

So, what do the two tech bigwigs have against laws restricting the commercial use of patented inventions and copyrighted works of creative expression? It’s probably got to do with how they impact the current talk of the town in tech: AI models trained on copyrighted works produced through hours of human chin-scratching.

Dorsey’s call to Ctrl A+Delete terabytes of laws regulating the monetization of human ingenuity garnered nearly 5,000 replies:

• Tech investor Chris Messina commented that “automated IP fines/3-strike rules for AI infringement may become the substitute for putting poor people in jail for cannabis possession.”
• Tech entrepreneur and attorney Nicole Shanahan disagreed, saying deletion wasn’t reasonable but that she’s open to discussing IP reform.
• Writer Lincoln Michel suggested that Dorsey and Musk’s anti-IP stance is hypocritical, claiming that “none of Jack or Elon’s companies would exist without IP law.”

Since it’s hard to boil this all down to 280 characters, let’s get into the complicated legal and business issues behind the social media squabble.

Open vs. pay-walled innovation

Musk and Dorsey are members of the Silicon Valley clique convinced that current IP regulations are as conducive to tech advances as human-operated toll booths are to speeding up traffic. Dorsey is a longtime champion of open-source software. In 2019, he founded the Twitter clone Bluesky as an open-source project, and his company Block recently released the AI agent-building application called Goose, which is free for anyone to use.

Before that, Musk once said that “patents are for the weak.”

• He famously declared a decade ago that Tesla wouldn’t sue anyone who uses its tech “in good faith,” though it did subsequently end up in a patent dispute with an Australian electronics company.
• The first version of Musk’s AI bot, Grok, was partially open-source, pitting it philosophically against the proprietary (aka not free to use for profit) OpenAI models.

But not everyone agrees: Intellectual property law professor Dennis Crouch claims that Dorsey and Musk don’t like IP law because it impedes their business interest as tech moguls, since these laws are meant to preserve small enterprises against corporate behemoths.

Creatives rise up

Unsurprisingly, the biggest advocates for compensating creatives for their work that gets used to train AI are…creatives. Michel declared in his X response that Musk and Dorsey simply “hate artists.”

More than 30,000 creators recently signed a Statement on AI Training almost as succinct as Dorsey’s post. It said: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.” Similar sentiments have been shared by visual and musical artists, as well as journalists, but the legal questions remain unsettled:

• The New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that the company used its content illegally to train ChatGPT. However, several news organizations, like News Corp, Axel Springer (Morning Brew’s parent company), and Time magazine, have entered licensing agreements with AI companies.
• A group of publishers and authors, including Sarah Silverman and Junot Díaz, are suing Meta, alleging that it used their copyrighted works to train its Llama AI models without compensating them. Meta claims that feeding its AI training algorithm the works of literature constituted “fair use.”

What is fair use? It’s the legal term for when copyright-protected content can be used without the owner’s permission for a “transformative” purpose such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research—for example, a poem quoted in a news article, or an SNL parody of the latest Severance episode. Legal scholars say judges in the creators vs. AI companies cases will have to consider the complex technicalities of exactly how the AI was trained using proprietary content and whether it meets the definition of fair use.

This won’t be solved with tweets

Experts say that IP law needs to be updated to keep pace with technological advancements and the evolving distribution of content. The breakneck pace of AI development creates even more urgency for these updates.

Some warn that a global patchwork of laws could complicate AI development and have called for the establishment of international standards.

It’s happening as you read. Legislators worldwide have been working to revise IP laws for the age of AI, aiming to strike a balance between innovation and fairly compensating creators. Some countries are considering a more pro-AI approach, like the UK, where the government is weighing a controversial rule that would let companies use copyrighted works without permission if IP owners don’t opt out.—SK

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

For most people who observe Easter, it’s a holiday celebrated with chocolate, bunnies, and egg hunts (the ones conducted by children, not adults currently in search of a reasonably priced dozen). But in Norway, where ~85% of residents identify as Christian, Easter is marked by a very different tradition: the consumption of graphic and intense crime fiction.

Before you judge—is that really so much weirder than giant rabbits delivering candy for kids?

In Norway, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus is paired with the enjoyment of Nordic noir, or Påskekrims, crime stories that are particularly bloody and set in bleak Scandinavian settings. Norway’s official tourism site suggests Easter is when people head to a snowy mountain, nestle into a cabin, and consume gory violence involving dark narratives…as a family.

The origins: Norway fell in love with the genre about 100 years ago. A week before Easter in 1923, a publisher ran a front-page newspaper ad for a novel about a train robbery that the public believed was true, marking the launch of a tradition.

Netflix gets it: It’s probably not a coincidence that the streamer dipped into Nordic noir with The Glass Dome, a show about a criminologist, who had been abducted and held prisoner as a child, trying to track down a missing girl in Sweden. The series concluded this week (spoiler alert), so it wouldn’t be a surprise if cabins throughout Norway are aglow with a binge-watch.—DL