Ever written a blog? Built a web page? Participated in a Reddit thread?

• Chances are your words have contributed to the education of AI chatbots everywhere, Axios tech managing editor Scott Rosenberg writes from the Bay Area.

Why it matters: The AI boom is built on data. The data comes from the internet — and the internet came from us. But we produced all that stuff for one another, not for AI.

⚖️ What's happening: This massive verbal repurposing is triggering a legal brawl over whether it should be treated as fair use or theft.

• It's also inspiring a personal reckoning for many of the millions whose postings built today's online world.

🧠 How it works: We thought we were sharing our hearts and minds — and of course we were.

• But without realizing it, we were also creating a database — incomplete, but rich — of human expression.
• That database fuels he uncanny sentence-completion gymnastics of ChatGPT and its competitors.

Visual AI tools — Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion — got popular before verbal chatbots like ChatGPT. So visual creators — photographers, illustrators and fine artists — were the first to grapple with this realization.

• Musicians face the same epiphany, as they encounter multiplying AI-conjured facsimiles of their works — like the (fake) collaboration between Drake and the Weeknd, "Heart on My Sleeve."

A Washington Post project, "Inside the Black Box," lets you enter any internet domain name to answer the question: "Is your website training AI?" (This doesn't include ChatGPT: OpenAI has not disclosed its sources.)

💬 Scott's thought bubble: The personal blog I wrote for 15 years is well represented in the Post data set — along, it seems, with most of the other writing I contributed for 10 years to the web magazine I helped create.

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Nvidia, a chipmaking giant that helped ignite PC gaming, is this year's highest-flying stock in the S&P 500, Matt Phillips writes for Axios Markets.

• Why it matters: Soaring semiconductor share prices reflect the promise — and hype — surrounding artificial intelligence.

Nvidia — which transformed the industry in 1999 by inventing the graphics processing unit (GPU) — now says it's "The Engine of AI."

🧮 By the numbers: Nvidia — based in Santa Clara, Calif. — has seen its stock rocket 85% this year.

The bottom line: The surge shows that, as Axios' Felix Salmon notes, "there's real money in selling picks and shovels to the folks getting into AI."

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Julie Chavez Rodriguez — White House senior adviser, and director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs — is expected to be named manager of President Biden's 2024 campaign, AP and Reuters report.

• Rodriguez, a longtime Democratic activist, also worked in former President Obama's White House. She's the granddaughter of labor leader Cesar Chavez and labor activist Helen Fabela Chávez.

🔎 Between the lines: Rodriguez is a West Wing ally of Vice President Harris.

• She served on Harris' Senate staff, and on her 2020 presidential campaign as national political director and traveling chief of staff.

Growing up in California, Rodriguez — a U.C. Berkeley grad — was active in campaigns, picket lines, boycotts, marches and union meetings.

• She was hired by Biden's 2020 presidential campaign as a deputy campaign manager and senior adviser for Latino outreach.

🔮 What's next: Biden is expected to formally announce his campaign with a video tomorrow. He'll also speak tomorrow to leaders of North America's Building Trades Unions (NABTU).

Countries around the world spent a combined $2.24 trillion on their militaries last year — a 3.7% increase on last year's previous record high when adjusted for inflation, Axios World author Dave Lawler writes from an annual report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

• Many of the biggest increases came in Europe as countries responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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Twitter users are pushing back against Elon Musk's new pay-for-verification policy, with many journalists and celebrities refusing to pay to keep their once-coveted blue checks, Axios' Sara Fischer and Rebecca Falconer report.

• Why it matters: Internet verification used to be a badge of honor. Now it's achievable to anyone who is willing to buy it.

What's happening: Twitter on Thursday began removing blue check marks from hundreds of thousands of accounts belonging to celebrities, journalists and other public figures who were verified by the platform before Musk changed the rules.

• The Twitter CEO later announced he's personally paying for some high-profile users to remain verified on Twitter, even when they'd indicated they didn't want this status under his new subscription system.
• Blue checks have returned to the Twitter profiles of many accounts with more than 1 million followers.

🧐The checkmarks returned to accounts of several famous Twitter users who are no longer alive, with the message: "This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number."

• This includes journalist Jamal Khashoggi, killed in 2018; chef Anthony Bourdain, who died the same year; Kobe Bryant and actor Chadwick Boseman, who both died in 2020; and Barbara Walters, who died last year.

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A new paper finds evidence that tweets — particularly from those in the startup community— exacerbated the run on Silicon Valley Bank last month, Emily Peck writes for Axios Markets.

• Why it matters: Social media-fueled bank runs — SVB's collapse was the first — are a new risk to the financial system. And regulators don't know yet how to manage them.

The research, from five finance professors in the U.S. and Europe, is the first large-scale academic attempt to answer whether the tweets about SVB merely reflected reality or hastened the bank's collapse.

• The researchers coded tweets as positive or negative — based on keywords like "run" and "withdraw" — and tracked whether the tweeter was in the startup world.

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Comcast announced it was "mutually agreed" that NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell would depart immediately following an "investigation led by outside counsel into a complaint of inappropriate conduct."

• "I had an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company, which I deeply regret," Shell said in the statement.

🖼️ The big picture: The media industry has seen many top-level executives ousted over inappropriate workplace relationships, Axios Media Trends expert Sara Fischer writes.

• Shell, 57, had been CEO of NBCU since 2020. He had been with the company since 2013, and worked for its parent Comcast since 2009.

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The fire-breathing animatronic dragon burst into flames during Disneyland's popular "Fantasmic!" show on Saturday night.

• The show, near Tom Sawyer Island, climaxes with Mickey Mouse battling a giant dragon, Maleficent.

Mickey vanished from the stage as soon as the dragon's head became engulfed. No injuries were reported.

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