Enlarge / Let's see, you landed on my "Google Ads" space, and with three houses... that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

Dozens of exhibits from the Google antitrust trial are still being hidden from the public , The New York Times Company alleged in a court filing today.

According to The Times, there are several issues with access to public trial exhibits on both sides. The Department of Justice has failed to post at least 68 exhibits on its website that were shared in the trial, The Times alleged, and states have not provided access to 18 records despite reporters' requests.

Google's responses to document requests have also been spotty, The Times alleged. Sometimes Google "has not responded at all" to requests to review public exhibits. Other times, Google responds, but "often does not provide the exhibit in its entirety," The Times claimed, including limiting public access to "particular page(s) of the exhibit shown to a given witness."

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Getty Images)

Weeks after The New York Times updated its terms of service (TOS) to prohibit AI companies from scraping its articles and images to train AI models, it appears that the Times may be preparing to sue OpenAI. The result, experts speculate, could be devastating to OpenAI, including the destruction of ChatGPT's dataset and fines up to $150,000 per infringing piece of content.

NPR spoke to two people "with direct knowledge" who confirmed that the Times' lawyers were mulling whether a lawsuit might be necessary "to protect the intellectual property rights" of the Times' reporting.

Neither OpenAI nor the Times immediately responded to Ars' request to comment.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a "robot journalist." (credit: Midjourney)

Google has been developing tools aimed at helping journalists write news articles, reports The New York Times and Reuters . It has demonstrated one tool, dubbed "Genesis," to the Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly, Google is positioning the tool as a personal assistant for news reporters.

According to Reuters, Genesis is not intended to automate news writing but can instead potentially support journalists by offering suggestions for headlines or alternative writing styles to enhance productivity. "Quite simply, these tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating, and fact-checking their articles," a Google spokesperson told Reuters.

Like OpenAI with its ChatGPT AI assistant that can compose text, Google has also been developing large language models (LLMs) such as PaLM 2 that have absorbed massive amounts of information scraped from the Internet during training, and they can use that "knowledge" to summarize information, rephrase sentences, explain concepts, and more. Naturally, both companies have sought to find market applications for this technology, including in journalism.

Enlarge / FTC Chair Lina M. Khan testifies during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee nomination hearing on April 21, 2021, in Washington, DC. (credit: Graeme Jennings/Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan pledged to use existing laws to regulate AI in a New York Times op-ed , "We Must Regulate A.I. Here's How." In the piece, she warns of AI risks such as market dominance by large tech firms, collusion, and the potential for increased fraud and privacy violations.

In the op-ed, Khan cites the rise of the "Web 2.0" era in the mid-2000s as a cautionary tale for AI's expansion, saying that the growth of tech companies led to invasive surveillance and loss of privacy. Khan feels that public officials must now ensure history doesn't repeat itself with AI, but without unduly restricting innovation.

"As these technologies evolve," she wrote, "we are committed to doing our part to uphold America’s longstanding tradition of maintaining the open, fair and competitive markets that have underpinned both breakthrough innovations and our nation’s economic success—without tolerating business models or practices involving the mass exploitation of their users."

Enlarge / Geoffrey Hinton, chief scientific adviser at the Vector Institute, speaks during The International Economic Forum of the Americas (IEFA) Toronto Global Forum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019. (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards)

According to the New York Times , AI pioneer Dr. Geoffrey Hinton has resigned from Google so he can "speak freely" about potential risks posed by AI. Hinton, who helped create some of the fundamental technology behind today's generative AI systems, fears that the tech industry's drive to develop AI products could result in dangerous consequences—from misinformation to job loss or even a threat to humanity.

"Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now," the Times quoted Hinton as saying. "Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary."

Hinton's resume in the field of artificial intelligence extends back to 1972, and his accomplishments have influenced current practices in generative AI. In 1987, Hinton, David Rumelhart, and Ronald J. Williams popularized backpropagation , a key technique for training neural networks that is used in today's generative AI models. In 2012, Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky, and Ilya Sutskever created AlexNet , which is commonly hailed as a breakthrough in machine vision and deep learning, and it arguably kickstarted our current era of generative AI. In 2018, Hinton won the Turing Award , which some call the "Nobel Prize of Computing," along with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.

Enlarge (credit: STEFANI REYNOLDS / Contributor | AFP )

After a weekend where many Twitter users waited to witness the moment when their legacy verified badges disappeared, the official Twitter handle of The New York Times became one of the first accounts to lose its verified status. While many legacy accounts still have their badges, the speedy removal of the badge from one of the platform’s most influential organizations was seemingly personally directed by Elon Musk, The Washington Post reported .

In response to a meme joking about the Times’ decision not to pay $1,000 a month to keep the gold check mark that Twitter sells to verify businesses, Musk tweeted on Saturday, “Oh ok, we’ll take it off then.” On Sunday, Musk deleted a tweet that said legacy verified accounts would be given “a few weeks grace” before the check marks vanish “unless they tell they won’t pay now, in which we will remove it.”

Making an example out of revoking the Times’ verified status seemed personal to Musk. In several tweets, Musk mocked the Times —which the Post noted is Twitter’s 24th most followed account—calling its news articles “propaganda” that “isn’t even interesting” and describing its Twitter feed as “diarrhea” that’s “unreadable.” He also tweeted that the Times was being “hypocritical” because the news organization is “super aggressive about forcing everyone to pay their subscription” fees. (Two years ago, the Times increased its digital subscription price for the first time, CNN reported , raising it to $17 a month.)