The very hungry web crawler

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using the newspaper’s content to train ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot. The outcome may answer some pressing questions about copyright law and the fair use doctrine. In this episode, we’ll break down data scraping — the content-copying practice at the heart of lawsuits like this one. Plus, credit unions profit big time from overdraft fees, Black Americans move south in a reverse Great Migration to flee pollution, and student loan borrowers aren’t back in the swing of things months after repayment restarted.