Author: NY TIMES

OpenAI, Google and other tech companies train their chatbots with huge amounts of data culled from books, Wikipedia articles, news stories and other sources across the internet. But in the future, they hope to use something called synthetic data.That’s because tech companies may exhaust the high-quality text the internet has to offer for the development of artificial intelligence. And the companies are facing copyright lawsuits from authors, news organizations and computer programmers for using their works without permission. (In one such lawsuit, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft.)Synthetic data, they believe, will help reduce copyright issues and boost…

Historically speaking, it’s not a bad time to be the liver of a teenager. Or the lungs.Regular use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs among high school students has been on a long downward trend.In 2023, 46 percent of seniors said that they’d had a drink in the year before being interviewed; that is a precipitous drop from 88 percent in 1979, when the behavior peaked, according to the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a closely watched national poll of youth substance use. A similar downward trend was observed among eighth and 10th graders, and for those three age groups when…

The rapper Cardi B found herself embroiled in a sharp back-and-forth with a social media personality this week after he brought up her social class, upbringing and skin color. A quarrel soon erupted over colorism and questions of who gets to profit over which public affect.Of course, Cardi B isn’t one to shrink from a fight, and it wasn’t even the first spat this year to involve a high-profile rapper. But the argument is notable for the difficult issues it broached having to do with colorism — the way prejudice can vary based on someone’s skin color, and how it…

By the time President Biden hung up the phone, he had finally delivered the threat he had refused to make for months: Israel had to change course, he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or the United States would.But as the conversation ended on Thursday, aides to Mr. Biden said, the president had reason to hope that the message had gotten through and that he would not have to carry out his threat after all.During the call, Mr. Biden outlined several specific commitments he wanted Israel to make to avoid losing his support for the war against Hamas. Rather than pushing…

Ecuadorean police officers entered the Mexican embassy in Quito on Friday night to arrest Ecuador’s former vice president who had taken refuge there, prompting Mexico to suspend bilateral relations.Jorge Glas, the former vice president, had been sentenced to prison and there was a warrant out for his arrest before Mexico granted him asylum, Ecuador’s presidential office said in a statement announcing the arrest. Mr. Glas had lived at the embassy since December and was granted political asylum earlier on Friday.The statement said that “no criminal can be considered politically persecuted.”The statement, from the office of President Daniel Noboa, added that…

This year I made time to grow the best vegetables, monster vegetables, that I’ve ever grown in my life. My houses are never done. And I’m writing my autobiography. That’s the scariest project for me because I don’t really like everything about myself — where I’ve been, what I’ve done.I get up at 6:30 every morning. My housekeeper comes at 7, and I can’t be in bed when she arrives. That would be very embarrassing. I’m a bad sleeper, in any case. At times I’d rather watch a documentary. Other times, I might be anxious, not for me but for…

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we reached peak chile crisp in the United States, but if you were to inspect my kitchen today you’d see, alongside an old jar of Lao Gan Ma — years ago, the only chile crisp I could easily find in the food shops nearby — at least a half-dozen others.While each jar contains a spicy crimson sediment under oil, some have the sweetness of star anise, while others are deepened with tiny dried shrimp or fried shallots. Some have the delicate crunch of fried sesame seeds, garlic or crushed peanuts, or the mouth-numbing tingle…

She was thus “an interesting bridge” between Ms. Anderson and the newer generation of Black opera singers, said Ms. André, who has written about Black opera singers, and who noted that Ms. Tynes, her neglect notwithstanding, had an “incredible” voice. Ms. André suggested that Ms. Tynes’s success in Europe was a testimony to her singular talent.Her one major recital on disk, a blistering collection of arias by Verdi and Richard Strauss, was released by the Qualiton label in Hungary in 1962. In a 2021 episode of the podcast “Counter Melody,” that was devoted to her, the American singer Daniel Gundlach…

The Israeli police said they arrested eight people at the Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, where thousands of Muslim worshippers had come for dawn prayers on the last Friday of Ramadan amid heavy security.The police said that the eight people had been arrested for participating in “incendiary chants and endorsement of terrorism.” It did not provide further details.The mosque is one of the holiest sites for Muslims and is part of a compound that is sacred to Jews, who call it the Temple Mount. It has long been a chronic flashpoint in tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.Concerns have run…

Lynne Reid Banks, a versatile British author who began her writing career with the best-selling feminist novel “The L-Shaped Room” but found her biggest success with the popular children’s book “The Indian in the Cupboard,” died on Thursday in Surrey, England. She was 94.Her death, at a care facility, was caused by cancer, said James Wills, her literary agent.Ms. Banks was part of a generation of writers, including Shelagh Delaney and Margaret Drabble, that emerged in postwar Britain and whose books explored the struggles of young women seeking personal and financial independence, in sharp contrast to the contemporaneous “angry young…