IOU anxiety… The US hit its $31.4T debt limit last week, risking a scenario where the US government can’t pay its bills. Refresher: the govt spends more than it collects in taxes, so it constantly borrows. But there’s a limit to how much the Treasury can borrow through bonds/bills. Now the US risks defaulting on its debt, which would be disastrous. A default has never happened since lawmakers passed legislation to raise or suspend the ceiling every time (100 times since WWII). Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen plans to use “extraordinary maneuvers” until June to give lawmakers more time to agree on a solution.
AI lawsuits are here.… Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained on billions of texts or images scraped from the internet — many of which are copyrighted by human creators. Last week artists sued AI-art generators Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, arguing they unlawfully used their copyrighted images. Getty Images sued Stability AI over the same thing. There aren’t clear rules around genAI use, but suits could set precedents for how to handle these cases. It could get thorny for companies like Microsoft, which plans to integrate genAI into its products.