Search the archive.

Such considerations warrant decoupling biodiversity loss from climate change, because the former has been consistently subsumed by the latter as a mere effect. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions—such as restoring habitats, creating protected areas (“biodiversity parks”), and practicing sustainable agriculture. The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in danger of dying. Consistent with these data, the 2014 Living Planet Report shows that the global population of wild vertebrates dropped by 52 percent in only four decades—from 1970 to 2010. While biologists often avoid projecting historical trends into the future because of the complexity of ecological systems, it’s tempting to extrapolate this figure to, say, the year 2050, which is four decades from 2010. As it happens, a 2006 study published in Science does precisely this: It projects past trends of marine biodiversity loss into the 21st century, concluding that, unless significant changes are made to patterns of human activity, there will be virtually no more wild-caught seafood by 2048. Catastrophic consequences for civilization. The consequences of this rapid pruning of the evolutionary tree of life extend beyond the obvious. There could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. For example, prior research has shown that localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. According to a 2012 paper published in Nature, there are reasons for thinking that we may be approaching a tipping point of this sort in the global ecosystem, beyond which the consequences could be catastrophic for civilization. As the authors write, a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human life.” According to Missouri Botanical Garden ecologist Adam Smith, one of the paper’s co-authors, this could occur in a matter of decades—far more quickly than most of the expected consequences of climate change, yet equally destructive. Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Indeed, it could even fuel the rise of terrorism. (After all, climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria, and multiple high-ranking US officials, such as former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and CIA director John Brennan, have affirmed that climate change and terrorism are connected.) The reality is that we are entering the sixth mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, and the impact of this event could be felt by civilization “in as little as three human lifetimes,” as the aforementioned 2012 Nature paper notes. Furthermore, the widespread decline of biological populations could plausibly initiate a dramatic transformation of the global ecosystem on an even faster timescale: perhaps a single human lifetime. The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. As such, it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.

WASHINGTON, Jan 25 (Reuters) - An effort by Republican U.S. lawmakers to reallocate $18 billion in climate-friendly agriculture funding under President Joe Biden's signature climate law would shift money away from programs that primarily benefit farmers in Republican-leaning states, a Reuters analysis found.

The Inflation Reduction Act money, earmarked for U.S. Department of Agriculture-designated "climate-smart" farm practices, is intended to support Biden's agriculture climate agenda, which relies heavily on storing carbon in the soil and lowering emissions through sustainable farming techniques.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) risks leaving the Senate at the end of the year with a big question mark hanging over her almost three-decade career in Washington.

As the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, she is waging her third and final fight over the farm bill, which sets agriculture and nutrition policy every five years, yet she may retire with the latest package stuck in limbo.

Yew-Kwang Ng, “KEYNOTE: Global Extinction and Animal Welfare: Two Priorities for Effective Altruism,” Global Policy, 02-07-2019,

Catastrophic climate change

Hubertus Meinecke, “AI Is Essential for Solving the Climate Crisis,” Boston Consulting Global, 07-01-2022, https://www.bcg.com/publications/2022/how-ai-can-help-climate-change

Mitigation is therefore critical, including efforts to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. However, minimizing the harm will also require increasing our efforts at adaptation and resilience—from immediate crisis response to long-term planning. Further, these efforts will require support from activities such as research, finance, and education.

Celine Herweijer, “8 Ways AI Can Help Save The Planet,” World Economic Forum, 01-18-2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/8-ways-ai-can-help-save-the-planet/

The challenge, however, goes beyond guiding “human friendly AI” to ensuring “Earth friendly AI”. As the scale and urgency of the economic and human health impacts from our deteriorating natural environment grows, we have an opportunity to look at how AI can help transform traditional sectors and systems to address climate change, deliver food and water security, build sustainable cities, and protect biodiversity and human wellbeing.

Adam Clark Estes, “How copyright lawsuits could kill OpenAI,” Vox, 01-18-2024, https://www.vox.com/technology/2024/1/18/24041598/openai-new-york-times-copyright-lawsuit-napster-google-sony

The case for innovation

Pamela Samuelson, “Generative AI meets copyright,” Science, 07-13-2023, https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adi0656

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a disruptive technology that is widely adopted by members of the general public as well as scientists and technologists who are enthusiastic about the potential to accelerate research in a wide variety of fields. But some professional artists, writers, and programmers fiercely object to the use of their creations as training data for generative AI systems and to outputs that may compete with or displace their works (1, 2). Lack of attribution and compensation for use of their original creations are other sources of aggravation to critics of generative AI. Copyright lawsuits that are now underway in the United States have substantial implications for the future of generative AI systems. If the plaintiffs prevail, the only generative AI systems that may be lawful in the United States would be those trained on public domain works or under licenses, which will affect everyone who deploys generative AI, integrates it into their products, and uses it for scientific research.

Charlotte Tobitt, “Legal experts say OpenAI has ‘case to answer’ in showdown with New York Times,” Press Gazette, 01-11-2024, https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/new-york-times-openai-microsoft-ip-experts/

The New York Times complaint refers to US copyright law, under which the “fair use” defence can cover “transformative” uses that add something new and do not substitute the original work.

Thomas Carey, “The New York Times v. OpenAI: The Biggest IP Case Ever,” JD Supra, 01-11-2024, https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-new-york-times-v-openai-the-biggest-5149037/

Thus, while these cases justified significant copying on fair use grounds, it is by no means clear that OpenAI will meet with similar success. If the New York Times were to prevail in court, it would likely obtain the largest intellectual property infringement judgment ever awarded and cause the makers of large language models to re-think their methodologies. If OpenAI and Microsoft were to succeed, their continued ingestion of content from the New York Time and other leading newspapers (among them, the LA Times, The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune) could add yet another impediment to the survival of independent journalism.

Charlotte Tobitt, “Legal experts say OpenAI has ‘case to answer’ in showdown with New York Times,” Press Gazette, 01-11-2024, https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/new-york-times-openai-microsoft-ip-experts/

“OpenAI has publicly responded by saying it believes that training AI models using publicly available internet materials constitutes fair use and therefore isn’t an infringing act under US law.

Dinusha Mendis, “How a New York Times copyright lawsuit against OpenAI could potentially transform how AI and copyright work,” The Conversation, 01-17-2024, https://theconversation.com/how-a-new-york-times-copyright-lawsuit-against-openai-could-potentially-transform-how-ai-and-copyright-work-221059

The defence available to OpenAI is “fair use” under the US Copyright Act 1976, section 107. This is because the unlicensed use of copyright material to train generative AI models can serve as a “transformative use” which changes the original material. However, the complaint from the New York Times also says that their chatbots bypassed the newspaper’s paywalls to create summaries of articles.

Jay Eischen, “(Un)fair Use?: Understanding the New York Times’s Lawsuit Against Microsoft and OpenAI,” JetLaw, 01-08-2024, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/jetlaw/2024/01/08/unfair-use-understanding-the-new-york-timess-lawsuit-against-microsoft-and-openai/

The most apt defense available to OpenAI is the concept of “fair use,” which allows the use of copyrighted materials “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching…, scholarship, or research”.[5] For example, Google successfully invoked fair use to defend against claims of copyright infringement when it scanned and uploaded millions of books as part of its Google Books project—a favorable precedent that OpenAI would likely cite extensively.[6] Fair use determinations are guided by four factors:

Zachary H. Valentine, “New York Times vs. OpenAI: Fair Use Fight with Billions at Stake,” DarrowEverett LLP, 01-22-2024, https://www.darroweverett.com/new-york-times-vs-open-ai-fair-use-legal-analysis/

We will be following this case on the edge of our seat. The Times’ arguments, taken in isolation, are highly convincing that a plethora of infringements occurred, and that OpenAI’s commercialized use and reproduction of copyrighted material was not fair use. While OpenAI and Microsoft have not yet filed an answer or responsive motion to the Complaint (as of the date of this article), it is anticipated that their fair use arguments will focus on the GPT-powered products’ transformative use of the copyrighted material as a whole — or, in other words, that the use of the copyrighted material by the LLMs to create the GPT tools that serve myriad non-infringing purposes — and the lack of GPT-powered products being a market substitute for prospective and existing subscribers of the Times.

Matthew Smith, “The New York Times Wants ChatGPT Gone. Nice Try Copyright murkiness is about the only sure thing that lies ahead,” IEEE Spectrum, 01-06-2024, https://spectrum.ieee.org/chatgpt-new-york-times

Even so, the suit’s victory isn’t certain. Mike Masnick, founder and editor of the technology policy publication Techdirt, points out that prior cases, such as the Authors Guild lawsuit against Google Books, set a precedent that may protect the use of copyrighted data to train AI.

Edward Lanquist and Jeremy Ray, “Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law: The NYT v. OpenAI – Fair Use Implications of Generative AI,” Baker Donelson, 02-05-2024, https://www.bakerdonelson.com/artificial-intelligence-and-copyright-law-the-nyt-v-openai-fair-use-implications-of-generative-ai

Relevant case law from the Second Circuit, Ninth Circuit, and United States Supreme Court helps guide the fair use analysis. The below-referenced opinions support a likely finding of fair use as it relates to using unlicensed content to simply train LLMs.

Timothy Lee and James Grimmelmann, “Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI,” 02-20-2024, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york-times-might-win-its-copyright-lawsuit-against-openai/

Judges may be sympathetic to OpenAI

Timothy Lee and James Grimmelmann citing Daniel Jeffries, “Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI,” 02-20-2024, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york-times-might-win-its-copyright-lawsuit-against-openai/

The day after The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, the author and systems architect Daniel Jeffries wrote an essay-length tweet arguing that the Times “has a near zero probability of winning” its lawsuit. As we write this, it has been retweeted 288 times and received 885,000 views.

Matthew Pangle, “A Modern Reconceptualization of Copyrights as Public Rights,” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, 07-xx-2020, https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/356/2022/07/20025356/2.Pangle-Article_FINAL_Master.pdf

In recent years, both Congress and the Supreme Court have demonstrated efforts to synthesize legal doctrines with contemporary intellectual property developments. For example, in 2012, Congress passed the America Invents Act (AIA), implementing a major and much-needed overhaul of patent law.130 Additionally, in 2018, Congress passed the Music Modernization Act (MMA), a comprehensive statute attempting to facilitate more accurate royalty payments to music professionals in an increasingly digital music industry.131 The legislation came as a much-needed update to copyright law which had been thrown off balance by the emergence of digital streaming services like Spotify.132 The Supreme Court has similarly been willing to reconsider certain legal principles to account for new intellectual property developments. As recently as 2017, the Supreme Court struck down the Disparagement Clause of the Lanham Act as a facially unconstitutional viewpoint-discriminatory restraint on trademarks.133 The Court held that because trademarks are private—rather than government—speech, First Amendment protections apply to their use.134

Matthew Pangle, “A Modern Reconceptualization of Copyrights as Public Rights,” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, 07-xx-2020, https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/356/2022/07/20025356/2.Pangle-Article_FINAL_Master.pdf

Copyright law is at a crossroads. In the wake of Oil States Energy Servs., LLC v. Greene’s Energy Grp., LLC, the patent, copyright, and intellectual property regimes as a whole, are primed for a modern reconceptualization. At the heart of this reconceptualization is the distinction between public rights, those vindicated by public offices for the public good, and private rights, those vindicated by private citizens for their exclusive government-granted monopolies. Thanks to Oil States, patent rights now exist in two separate bundles—a public bundle including the patent grant itself and a private bundle consisting of a patent owner’s exclusivity rights.