The death toll of the Israel-Gaza war continues to rise, marking the conflict to be the deadliest one for journalists in recent decades. According to estimations by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), “at least 79 journalists and media workers were among the more than 24,000 killed since the war began on October 7” as of January 9.

The death toll includes 72 Palestinian journalists, four Israeli reporters, and three Lebanese. 19 more journalists have been reported injured or missing. “Many of the Palestinian journalists who have died were killed in airstrikes alongside multiple family members”, Press Gazette notes.

In recent years YouTube has emerged as one of the dominant platforms for podcast listening, despite the video platforms limited functionality for podcasts. YouTube has been building up more audio functionality, most recently with debuting RSS integration.

As The Verge reports, podcasters will be able to connect their RSS feeds to their YouTube account and automatically turn episodes into YouTube videos, marking “a significant step solidifying YouTube’s place as the top destination for podcasts”. Creators can opt in to YouTube’s ads and thus receive a share of the advertising revenue

In late December The New York Times sued ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged illegal use of the publisher’s content in training their large language models, marking the most prominent creator lawsuit against an AI company so far. This week OpenAI came out with a public response to the legal action.

The company says it believes NYT’s suit is without merit and emphasises its collaborations with news publishers like Axel Springer, as well as discussion of a potential deal with NYT before the suit was filed.

Notably, OpenAI claims its use of publisher content in AI models training falls under fair use. Besides, the company says that “regurgitation”, meaning AI models spitting out exact copies of the content they’ve been trained on (which is featured prominently in NYT’s lawsuit), is “a rare bug that we are working to drive to zero”.

Source of the cover photo: https://unsplash.com/

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YouTube’s podcast support, OpenAI’s response to NYT – weekly news digest