Weekend Box: Diplomatic Push & Pull, OpenAI Season & more
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s weekly round-up of interesting or obscure political, business and cultural news from around the world.
Image credit/U.S. Embassy Jerusalem/License
DIPLOMATIC PUSH & PULL
Spare a thought for US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who’s just returned home from another punishing trip, his fourth to the Middle East since the October 7th attacks by Hamas. After covering eight countries in seven days and receiving a chilly reception in most of them, he might well be lying jet-lagged in bed, wondering what he actually achieved and what was ever possible.
His primary challenge has been to influence long-term strategic ally Israel when there has never been greater divergence in what each country’s leadership sees as acceptable conduct in military operations and treatment of Palestinians, as well as a workable longer-term solution to resolve a humanitarian catastrophe and achieve a lasting, just peace. As Palestinian casualties have soared past 23,000 dead according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, unconditional support by America for Israel has become more conditional. Blinken has criticised the ‘far too high’ casualties this week while trying to revive wider Middle Eastern engagement with the Israel-Palestine problem and a viable two-state solution.
Back home and in an election year, the Biden administration has no clear mandate from the American people to guide its approach with Israel. A Gallup poll found about 41% think the US is doing ‘about the right amount,’ 39% ‘not enough,’ and 19% ‘too much.’ Approval is higher with Democrats at 48% versus 33% for Republicans, but that support is fragile.
On his trip Blinken talked up the prospect of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states establishing normal diplomatic relations with Israel and participating in the reconstruction of Gaza, if Israel ends the conflict and works toward a Palestinian state. Yet the Israeli government reject this position, so no break-through was forthcoming. He also claimed some credit for Israel accepting a UN assessment mission to Northern Gaza and withdrawing some troops elsewhere, but overall, the trip looked more like damage control than transformative.
Adding to the escalating tensions in the region, attacks by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea have now seen a response from the UK and US in the form of airstrikes on Yemen, targeted against facilities used by the rebels according to Prime Minister Sunak. Iran has condemned the strikes, and the Saudi foreign ministry has called for restraint to avoid any further escalation of an already dire situation in the Middle East.
Image credit/Jernej Furman from Slovenia/License
OPENAI SEASON
A new year, a rocky start for OpenAI, who are being sued left and right for copyright infringement.
Nonfiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage have issued a putative class action complaint against the ChatGPT creator, accusing it of stealing their work to use as training data for their large language models. The authors intend for the suit to represent the interests of all US authors and/or “legal beneficial owners” of copyright for written works being used to train LLMs. The suit is seeking damages of as much as $150,000 for each work used.
This is the most recent in a series of lawsuits to hit OpenAI, coming not two weeks after The New York Times sued the company for using its articles in training data. Last year a number of well-known authors took legal action for the same reasons as Basbanes and Gage, among them George R. R. Martin of ‘Game of Thrones’ fame. OpenAI, who have signed deals with publications to use their content, argue that “copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression,” meaning it would be impossible to train “today’s leading AI models” with the vast amounts of data required without using copyrighted material.
In comments to the US Copyright Office, companies leading the AI race – Microsoft and Anthropic among them – take various lines of defense to justify training systems on copyrighted material, though a few reiterate the same argument: while copying existing written works is a necessary feature of creating training data for AI, companies are not doing this to steal the authors’ intellectual property. Rather, it is so the AI systems can absorb their ideas and learn from them, as a human does when reading.
Whether this will convince the NYT and the growing number of authors who have sued OpenAI is another matter.
Image credit/中文（臺灣）：中華民國總統府/License
TAIWAN CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE
Against the backdrop of heightened military pressure in the Taiwan Strait and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s assertions that the island will “surely be reunified,” Taiwan’s elections on January 13th could have profound implications for cross-Strait and US-China relations.
It is one of the most closely contested races since the self-governing island first held elections in 1996.
The frontrunners for the presidency are Lai Ching, the current vice president of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and Hou You-yi of Kuomintang (KMT), the main opposition party.
There is also a third wildcard candidate: Ko Wen-Je from the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who has built a huge following online and has positioned his party as the middle point between DPP and KMT.
Lai of the DPP is a champion of Taiwan’s de-facto sovereignty and separate identity from China. While he has moderated his language on the campaign trail, his strong anti-China stance has the potential to spark conflict and is a concern for both Beijing and Washington.
His main challenger, Hou Yu-ih, the popular mayor of New Taipei City, traditionally favours closer ties with China and blames the DPP for escalating tensions. However, closer ties do not mean reunification, which Hou Yu-ih has ruled out and only a fraction of the population support.
Hou Yu-ih also recognises Taiwan as a part of China, whereas Lai has controversially refused to do so. It is, therefore, no surprise that Chinese authorities favour KMT whom they have had historic exchanges with.
They have urged the people of Taiwan to make the “correct choice” – widely seen as a euphemism for not voting DPP. There are also reports that China has bombarded Taiwan with fake news and fabricated polls in the election run-up.
Taiwan also remains the biggest source of tension between China and the US, with whom the DPP has fostered strong diplomatic relations.
How China responds to the choices made by Taiwan’s voters this weekend will test whether Beijing and Washington can manage tensions, or whether Saturday’s result could trigger a confrontation and conflict.
NORWAY DIVES INTO DEEP-SEA MINING
The Norwegian government’s decision this week to permit commercial deep-sea mining in its waters was met with concern by environmental groups, promising years of campaigns and controversy.
A vast slice of the floor of the North Sea, an area bigger than the size of the UK, will be opened up with the aim of extracting metals including cobalt, copper, lithium, and scandium.
These resources are critical for battery production and other green technologies needed to shift the globe away from fossil fuels for good. They are rarely found below solid ground; only a handful of countries have notable cobalt and lithium deposits and competition for extraction rights is severe.
Mining companies argue that the ocean provides the answer to supplying the rare earth elements needed for the green transition in the form of polymetallic nodules. These lumps of rock, which could be mistaken for coal, are found scattered on the seafloor. They can be collected through a huge hoover-like tube by underwater dredging machines and brought up to the surface. It is a huge technological challenge and, as a method for obtaining rare elements, is as yet unproven.
Environmental groups argue such activity would obliterate deep-sea habitats, about which we know very little. Marine biologists say the disturbance caused by massive machinery operating on the seabed would disrupt the delicate ocean ecosystem, the ultimate impact of which is unknown.
Britain and the EU, together with a host of other countries, have called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining until strong and enforceable regulations are created for the practice. Some large companies, including Volvo, BMW, and Samsung, have made similar calls.
If mining were to go ahead in earnest, it wouldn’t be until the early 2030s; we can expect a lengthy debate over the ethics of this emerging industry for some time.
Image credit/Philippe Cendron/License
LOST & (NOT YET) FOUND
What links a moustache, a drawing of Queen Victoria, and a Diphydontosaurus jaw? Well, they’ve all gone walkabout from our museums in recent years. A recent freedom of information request asked for information on items missing from museums across the last 20 years and what was discovered to be lost was quite staggering. In total, more than 1,700 items are missing from museums in England, with the total being possibly higher when accounting for items that had not yet been catalogued.
From the Royal Museums Greenwich Group, a number of sizeable objects including a cannonball, a navigational aircraft computer, a gun-sighting telescope, charts, liquid compasses, an Act of Parliament, and an Altazimuth circle were lost, among other items. The Natural History Museum meanwhile appeared to have a particular issue with loaned items never quite making their return. These included a jaw fragment of a Late Triassic reptile, the Diphydontosaurus, which was lost when on loan in 2019, and some Cichlid fish, also lost on loan over the past 3 years. The Imperial War Museum had a large portion missing, some 550 objects, including ship camouflage drawings, British Army officer's private papers, a calendar with a photograph of former Iraq leader Saddam Hussein, and an entire canon, which went missing from the Royal Armouries Collection.
Some museums cited transfer to new databases as reasons for discrepancies, human error incorrectly documenting items in the first place, or “collection moves,” meaning catalogues had not been properly updated yet. However, perhaps the most creatively communicated statement came from the British Museum, who stated that items, rather than being lost were simply “not found” and “unlocated.”
And that’s it for this week. I hope you found something of interest that you might want to delve into further. If so, please get in touch at cwilkins@audleyadvisors.com.
For now, that’s The Weekend Box officially closed.