John J. Tierney

I've got a pocket full of umlauts and I ain't afraid to coördinate.

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now. Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible. Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it. They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks. The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory. Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word. Then it got worse. The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else. It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors. One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked. Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted. Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher. That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites. Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights. This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

The headlines are relentless. AI seems posed to outthink many of us. So what do humans do? Twenty years after writing A WHOLE NEW MIND about the rise of right-brainers, here’s my initial answer: Double down on six human skills. 🧵👇

More of this, please.😂

I have a new @TouringPlans Blog post outlining a very nice Pop Century Priceline hidden deal drop running from June to August! Prices for these deals run from $105 to $138 per night, come in about 44-50% under Disney's pricing. touringplans.com/blog/priceline…

@dougboneparth IRAN 50,000 wait, what

The bad news? We might be going to war with Iran. The good news? The stock market is up.

@dollarsanddata There can be only one. 🤺

Great business lesson here: It’s much easier to convince 3 people to spend $1 million than it is to convince 3 million to spend $1.

Millennials and Gen Z are swimming in student loan debt and unable to buy homes. Meanwhile, Boomers are getting increased tax deductions and interest savings on boat loans. It’s like they hate their kids or something.

@dollarsanddata AImnesia

We need a term for "AI can do every other job, but it can't do MY job." It's like Gell-Mann Amnesia, but for your career

Posting this for those who Disney. I maintain a quick reference page of handpicked Disney DVC rentals for Touring Plans subscribers for those who might be interested. You can see it here: touringplans.com/disney-vacatio… If not a subscriber, you can join here: touringplans.com/join?utm_campa…

Have to say, the new Muppet Show tonight was 100% terrific. So much fun, felt like I was watching the original show again. :)

Politicians + temptation is usually a toddler-and-toy problem. But the bigger risk is the toddler who insists gravity is a hoax and jumps anyway. And that's why we need to watch the toddler who wants to remove Fed guardrails.

Last night leaving for 7PM mass, there was a really nice moon out and a surprise next to it. I caught a quick photo from my porch, but my son caught a much better shot from the street. ...and if you zoom in, it seems to be we caught someone on their Christmas Eve rounds!🎅

@ElliottBlackwe3 Don’t forget to call Ernie Jenkins - he likes fires!

Trina Schart Hyman's illustration for 'A Child's Christmas In Wales' by Dylan Thomas.

As is tradition, on Christmas eve Dutch people have placed candles on the graves of allied soldiers who gave their lives for our freedom during WW2. Photos by Albert Hendriks. omroepbrabant.nl/nieuws/6001303…

I have a new @TouringPlans blog post with Priceline Express Deals from May to Sept at up to 52% off Disney's price! touringplans.com/blog/priceline…

@dougboneparth Shouldn't have taken that job at a shell company.

Come on salary!

A few weeks ago, as the military imposed the policy that eventually caused almost all reporters to turn in their press passes and leave the Pentagon, I wrote “Censorship Makes You Dumber.”

If you know where your news anchor likely stands on all major political issues, you’re not watching news, you’re watching propaganda.