News media versus OpenAI’s ChatGPT (GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Why in news?
- A group of news media organisations, including The New York Times, Reuters, CNN and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, recently shut off OpenAI’s ability to access their content.
- The development comes in the wake of reports that The New York Times is planning on suing the artificial intelligence (AI) research company over copyright violations, which would represent a considerable escalation in tensions between media companies and the leading creator of generative artificial intelligence solutions.
What does OpenAI do?
- The company is best known for creating ‘ChatGPT’, which is an AI conversational chatbot. Users can ask questions on just about anything, and ChatGPT will respond pretty accurately with answers, stories and essays. It can even help programmers write software code.
- The hype around ChatGPT has propelled OpenAI into becoming a $30 billion company.
What started the face-off between news outlets and OpenAI?
- Software products like ChatGPT are based on ‘large language models’ (LLMs). These models require enormous amounts of information to train their systems. If chat bots or digital assistants need to be able to understand the questions that humans throw at them, they need to study human language patterns.
- Tech companies that work on LLMs like Google, Meta or Open AI are secretive about what kind of training data they use. But it’s clear that online content found across the Internet, such as social media posts, news articles, Wikipedia, e-books, form a significant part of the dataset used to train ChatGPT and other similar products.
- This data is put together by scraping it off the Internet. Tech companies use software called ‘crawlers’ to scan web pages, hoover up content and put it together in a dataset that can be used to train their LLMs.
Why are media companies upset?
- Search engines like Google or Bing also use web crawlers to index websites and present relevant results when users search for topics.
- The only difference is that search engines represent a mutually beneficial relationship. Google, for instance, takes a snippet of a news article (a headline, a blurb and perhaps a couple of sentences) and reproduces them to make its search results useful. And while Google profits off of that content, it also directs a significant amount of user traffic to news websites.
- OpenAI provides no benefit, monetary or otherwise, to news companies. It simply collects publicly available data and uses it for the company’s own purposes.
What is the way forward?
- Tech gurus like to argue that the value of online content only exists in the aggregate. Or in other words, ChatGPT could still exist as a high-quality product without CNN’s reporting.
- But if all media publications across the world refused to provide access to OpenAI, it’s likely that the final product would be of lower quality. And, of course, if every single creator of online content turned down OpenAI, then ChatGPT would almost certainly not exist.
- However, it’s clear that OpenAI does believe some data is worth paying for.
- The legal battles ahead will have interesting implications for journalism, intellectual property and the future of artificial intelligence.
Why was the WFI suspended by United World Wrestling?
(GS Paper 2, International Organisation)
Why in news?
- In the backdrop of the wrestlers’ protest over various issues, United World Wrestling (UWW), the world governing body for the sport, has provisionally suspended the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) primarily for not conducting its elections on time.
What is the impact?
- This means that Indian wrestlers cannot compete under the national flag in UWW events, including the World championships in Belgrade in September.
- No national anthem will be played if an Indian wrestler wins a gold medal.
What caused the delay?
- As some prominent wrestlers brought allegations of sexual harassment, intimidation, financial irregularities and administrative lapse against the then WFI president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh and others and sat in protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar in January, the Union Sports Ministry asked the federation chief to step aside until an M.C. Mary Kom-headed Oversight Committee (OC) completed its enquiry.
- After the enquiry, even though the OC report was not made public, the WFI on April 16 announced that its elections, which were due in February, would be held on May 7.
- The wrestlers then returned to the protest site and demanded the arrest of former WFI president.
- They also demanded that Brij Bhushan’s family members should be stopped from contesting the elections. Brij Bhushan himself was not eligible to contest the WFI polls after completing three terms (12 years),
- The UWW Disciplinary Chamber found sufficient grounds to provisionally suspend the WFI due to the prevailing situation for at least six months. The absence of an elected president and a board did not comply with UWW regulations and its conditions for membership.
What is the way forward?
- Different factions of the WFI need to realise the immense loss the sport has suffered because of the ongoing issue.
- The only way to bail the country out of international ignominy and give the athletes their right to compete under the Tricolour is to conduct the WFI elections in a free and fair manner.
China releases new map showing territorial claims
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
Why in news?
- The Chinese government released the “2023 edition of the standard map of China”, which continues to show the entire State of Arunachal Pradesh and the Aksai Chin region within China’s borders.
- The 2023 map was released by the Ministry of Natural Resources.
Addition in latest map:
- The territorial claims on China’s western borders, as also the so-called nine-dash line covering the entire South China Sea, are shown on the map as in previous editions.
- Also as in previous maps, a “tenth dash” is placed east of Taiwan, underlining China’s claims over the island.
- The latest map follows China’s announcement in April that it would “standardise” the names of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh, including a town close to the Arunachal Pradesh capital of Itanagar.
- This was the third such list “renaming” places in Arunachal Pradesh, and was seen by observers as a response to India holding events in the lead-up to the G-20 summit in the State, which China had opposed.
National Mapping Awareness Publicity Week:
- The 2023 map was released during what is being called the “National Mapping Awareness Publicity Week” in China.
- Following the release of the standard map for public use, the Ministry of Natural Resources will also release “digital maps and navigation and positioning” for use in various fields including “location-based services, precision agriculture, platform economy and intelligent connected vehicles”.
- This year marks the 30-year anniversary of the Law of Surveying and Mapping of the People’s Republic of China which was passed “to strengthen the administration of the surveying and mapping undertaking, promote its development and ensure that it renders service to development of the national economy, the building up of national defence, and progress of the society”.
Background:
- Under Mr. Xi, China has tightened management of border areas, passing in 2022 a border law that lists responsibilities for civilian and military authorities to take steps to “safeguard national sovereignty”.
- The issuing of new names is related to Article 7 of the law, which calls for promoting border education at all levels of government. Article 22 calls for the Chinese military to carry out border drills and to “resolutely prevent, stop and combat” what it calls “invasions, encroachments and provocations”.
