Exploring Mass Communication

Morning Blend and Blurred Lines: How a sponsored-content pitch to Black-owned businesses in Milwaukee fell flat

There is so much wrong with this pitch that I swear I heard a marketing professor’s head explode somewhere in my building…

THE LEAD: WTMJ 4 in Milwaukee apparently saw Black History Month as an opportunity to tell local Black-owned businesses they could be on TV if they agreed to hand over a fistful of C-notes:

Milwaukee’s NBC affiliate TV station stirred up some ill feelings after marketing an opportunity to local Black-owned businesses to appear on a morning program during Black History Month, but only if they were willing to pay $1,000.

WTMJ-TV sent marketing emails to several Black business owners in the area offering an opportunity to appear on “The Morning Blend,” TMJ4’s daily lifestyle program, which airs weekdays at 9 a.m.

Despite looking and acting like a local news program, “The Morning Blend” is actually a sponsored-content program and part of the larger Scripps media brand. It appears in some form or other on stations in Las Vegas, Tampa and Milwaukee, each of which Scripps owns. The sponsored-content format is not unique to Scripps, and means you basically pay to play: If you are willing to cough up some cash, you can get a five-minute spot to promote basically anything.

If you don’t believe me, here’s the back end of a segment John Oliver did on “Last Week Tonight,” in which he bought space on sponsored-content programs in three media markets to promote “The Venus Veil.”

(If you want to watch the entire segment, which outlines how this works, why it’s a huge problem and how major media lines are being blurred, you can click the link below. That said, I have to warn you that there’s a great amount of F-bombs, a weird George Clooney segment and allegations of a man engaging in sexual relations with a ham.

To be fair, he’s always been weird, but the pandemic was going on when Oliver filmed this and that really pushed ALL of us into the exponentially weirdness zone…

Watch it if you want, but I warned you.)

The station manager at WTMJ tried to explain away the controversy of honoring people by asking them to pay to be honored with the same level of specificity and success as my kid does in explaining why her room is always a disaster zone:

TMJ4’s station manager, Gregg Schraufnagel, told the Journal Sentinel that “The Morning Blend” is a lifestyle program, not part of the news division, and that it is common for content to be sponsored on the program. “That’s always been the format of the show,” he said.

“The Morning Blend” has been on the air for 18 years.

Schraufnagel declined to get into the specific details of show’s makeup, how many of its segments are sponsored, its typical practices for reaching out to possible guests, or whether the program has charged for Black History Month segments in the past. “Things are evolving all the time,” he said.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: This entire situation has the comic-tragic vibe of a 1980s sit-com, in that so many things went wrong to make this as terrible as it is.

Start with sponsored content. It’s ubiquitous in the field and has been around for decades, if not longer, if you want to count things like advertorials and infomercials. Even the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s own website features it. In this case, right next to the story about WTMJ’s sponsored content:

As John Oliver notes, the lines here get really blurry, particularly when it feels like news and this stuff is all of equal value. The traditional commercial breaks in news or the display advertising in newspapers and websites were much more obviously promotional when compared to this stuff. As consumers tuned out these forms of advertising, marketers looked for ways to play a game of “here comes the airplane” with consumers. The pay-to-play world of ads has essentially borrowed other storytelling formats to make this happen.

That said, to average consumers, this can feel a bit like finding out that Santa is just a guy from your dad’s work who can really rock a white beard. You get used to these trusted local figures who tell you that something is good or something is fun and you believe it. To find that the whole program would sell you a fake Nazi-era sex blanket for the right price can really shatter your world view.

The second key problem here is everything about this pitch.

  • It starts off with a weirdly stylized Black History Month logo, that I can’t find anywhere else but here. It applies the colors of the month as well, although I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that nobody who built that logo could explain what those colors actually mean.
  • I get that they’re the hosts, but the photo of Molly Fay and Tiffany Ogle just does not work with this pitch. These folks in those poses seems to say, “Check out what confident white people can do for you!”
  • The pitch for Black History Month says how important it is for Morning Blend to feature black businesses as the show wants to “promote diversity” and “foster inclusivity,” a sentiment only slightly undercut by the “but only if you have $1,000 to spare” closing paragraph.
  • The second half of the pitch is essentially the same thing they’d send to ANYBODY at ANY POINT in the year, as this is the entire proposition of sponsored content: Come here, pay us money, we’ll have a positive chat and you’ll get air time plus a video clip to promote the hell out of yourself. This isn’t tied to Black History Month alone, nor is there some sort of “Black History Month Discount” for Black-owned businesses. These businesses could do the same thing around Juneteenth Day celebrations, MLK Day or Kwanzaa if they wanted. Hell, they could do it on St. Patrick’s Day or Casimir Pulaski’s birthday if they wanted.
  • When approaching certain topics, it always pays to be much more self-aware than this. I don’t know what it’s like to be anything but me, so I have limited knowledge of how best approach topics related to race, gender and ethnicity. That’s why I usually a) reach out to people I know who have insights before I do something like this, b) try to be more specific than general when I approach topics outside my area of expertise and c) know that I have a far greater chance of failing than succeeding in a truly massive way, so I need to be really, really careful. I don’t see that here at all. In fact, I’d bet that this thing gets a one-paragraph swap out at the bottom of the first column for every target audience the marketing department pitches.

EXERCISE TIME: Find a sponsored content segment and analyze it for its approach to the topic. Look for ways in which you would approach it differently if you were a reporter and trying to present this for a true news feature story.

When Charissa Thompson fakes NFL reports, all sideline reporters take a whack to their credibility

This photo says so much and not nearly enough about what is going on in her mind in regard to being a serious sports journalist.

THE LEAD: Charissa Thompson, a sports journalist (remember that word), caught hell this week after she stated on a podcast that while she worked NFL games, she would make up her sideline reports on occasion.

“I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again,” Thompson said. “I would make up the report sometimes because, A, the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime or it was too late and I was like, I didn’t want to screw up the report, so I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.'”

She then explained there was no harm in anything she would say to audiences.

“No coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field,'” she continued. “Like, they’re not gonna correct me on that. I’m like it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.”

After every single journalist on earth seemingly did the obligatory “WTF?!?!” social media post, Thompson tried to walk this back with a more measured statement:

“When on a podcast this week, I said I would make up reports early in my career when I worked as a sideline reporter before I transitioned to my current host role,” she said.

“Working in the media I understand how important words are and I chose wrong words to describe the situation. I’m sorry. I have never lied about anything or been unethical during my time as a sports broadcaster.

“In the absence of a coach providing any information that could further my report I would use information that I learned and saw during the first half to create my report. For example if a team was 0 for 7 on 3rd down, that would clearly be an area they need to improve on in the second half. In these instances I never attributed anything said to a player or coach.

So, if you’re following along at home, Thompson glibly did the “I’m so cool I can make stuff up and nobody cares” thing until she realized that EVERYBODY cares about the accuracy of sports journalism. Then, she did the “I chose my words poorly” thing, which is usually saved for when people make a career-ending comment and are desperately trying to save their careers.

DYNAMICS OF WRITING FLASHBACK: We’ve poked at sports journalism before about ethical breaches, blurring the line between reporting/fanboying and other similar things. We’ve also covered the issue of people in journalism making up quotes or sources when they didn’t really have the goods they needed to have in order to get stories they otherwise wouldn’t have.

It’s not a rare thing, unfortunately, to talk about people in journalism breaking the basic ethical codes of the field. It also seems to be in some of the dumbest possible circumstances, in that you rarely see a story like the one Jayson Blair made up about the D.C. Sniper and more so in situation where a reporter didn’t feel like asking a salt-of-the-earth pancake-eating source what they thought of inflation.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: The first and most obvious thing is that, as a journalist, you don’t make stuff up. You can’t include the word “reporter” in your title and then pretend that the tenets of accuracy and honesty don’t apply to you.

When I look at the career of a sideline reporter, I can’t imagine a more difficult job because of who tends to fill it, how the world tends to perceive them and how hard they have to hustle. The majority of these reporters are women, and sports have never been too kindly to female journalists. The book, “Who Let Them In?,” does an amazingly and painfully detailed job of explaining what path-breaking women in sports journalism went through and what women in sports journalism still go through.

The television element adds the issue of physical attractiveness to the topic at hand. You might get a heavy-set guy with the remnants of a bad teenage bout with acne on the screen, but you’re almost assuredly not going to see a woman of a similar description.

One of the first women to have a nationally prominent role on an NFL television program was Phyllis George, a former Miss America. Critics pointed out that George had limited television and sports experience, and was intended merely as eye candy for men. Unfortunately, as viewers got a heavy dose of female reporters on the sideline over the years, each of whom was “visually appealing,” the rap on these journalists became that anyone who could successfully rock a “Hooters” uniform could probably do the job.

The fact of the matter is that these journalists have to hustle harder than their counterparts in so many ways and be ready for almost anything. As some reports on this topic mentioned, when Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest on the field, the sideline reporters were the first and most direct line of communication to the public about his situation. When players are injured, when fights break out in the stands or when any other kind of bedlam takes place, these journalists are pushing for information and trying to keep the audiences informed.

When one person of a particular group (sideline reporters) breaks the code and kind of does it in a “oh, well, I’m not really a journalist anyway” kind of fashion, it hurts the remainder of the people in that group. That’s why you saw Laura Okmin, Andrea Kremer, Tracy Wolfson and dozens of other sideline reporters and female sports journalists coming out on social media to say, “We don’t make stuff up. Never. Don’t even think about it.”

Thompson’s actions and her disclosure in this fashion caused a great deal of harm to journalists who already have to work way too hard to be considered journalists at all, let alone equals of people who often have less journalism-based education and media training than they do. As we have seen in some of the other cases noted earlier, this is a firing offense and it should be.

ESPN does a DeepFake video of Damian Lillard and then tries to BS its way out of the outrage over ethics

A screenshot of the video ESPN posted that was digitally altered to put him in a Bucks uniform on the Bucks’ court after his Bucks debut.

 

THE LEAD: ESPN is backpedaling faster than the defense trying to stop Dame on a fast break after people figured out it created a “deepfake” video of Lillard using altered video footage from 2020 on its social media feed.

BACKGROUND: Lillard joined the Bucks in the off-season from Portland in a blockbuster trade. His debut against the 76ers lived up to the hype, as he scored 39 points, grabbed eight rebounds and handed out four assists.

After that, ESPN tweeted out a six-second video that featured Lillard in his Bucks jersey, with an ESPN microphone held at length, in which he lets people know this is basically going to be his resting pulse for the whole year as he’s making a run at a championship.

The problem is that people started figuring out this wasn’t legitimate, as the game was on TNT, so why was ESPN alone on this interview? Also, what was up with the weird pole thing? More detailed sleuths took issue with the fact the Bucks arena floor and Lillard’s jersey didn’t look right compared to the game footage they’d seen.

ESPN then issued a statement trying to explain away the fact they’d taken a video from the 2020 “Bubble Era,” removed TNT’s logo, PhotoShopped a Bucks jersey over Dame’s old Portland jersey and basically made stuff up:

“We occasionally look to connect sports moments of the past with contemporary imagery and storylines as part of our social content. While it was never our intention to misrepresent anything for fans, we completely recognize how this instance caused confusion.”

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE:

Shenanigans – REGION ONE REPORT

Uh-huh. SURE you didn’t mean to mislead people.

It’s hard to know the motivation of any one person and any one post, but this self-serving statement is total crap. That said, here’s the bigger problem: When you are the purveyor of actual content (games, SportsCenter, breaking news on athletes’ lives etc.), you are held to an actual ethical standard higher than that of a dipshit teen playing with an Instagram filter.

The spin that ESPN put on this thing about trying to “connect sports moments of the past with contemporary imagery” is laughable at best. If they had done something like a series of clips of Lillard over his career, with that audio over the top, fine. That’s at least “past meets present” (sort of).

But what they did was fabricate reality in a way that they KNEW would lead people to believe this was a contemporary moment, captured in its entirety by ESPN. (Also, what, exactly, was the need to PhotoShop out a competitor’s logo and PhotoShop in yours, if this was only an issue of trying to “connect sports moments?” Seems more like a cheater’s attempt at self-promotion to me.)

Deadspin does a good deep dive into this, where the ethical issue is front and center in chunks like this:

The ethical problems revealed by ESPN’s inexplicable lack of judgment are complex but illustrative of the battle currently being waged in sports media, and in news media overall.

First, there’s the problem of much of society seeing sports as entertainment, rather than news. If you justify sports as a space where people come to have fun — especially NBA Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, which is undefeated in terms of passionate fans who continually make hilarious memes and videos — then pretty much anything is ethical, right? After all, we’re all just having fun; no one thinks any of this is real.

And that’s very much the attitude had been many in the sports media space including, apparently, whoever green-lighted the Dame video at ESPN. And with the loss of shows that featured actual investigative reporting in sports, like ESPN’s Outside the Lines and HBO’s Real Sports, the space for real journalism in sports media continues to shrink.

In short, if you want people to take you seriously, you can’t do stupid crap that says, “Hey, we’re just screwing around with stuff for fun!”

 

 

DISCUSSION STARTER: What, if anything, should ESPN be doing in this arena?

  • Should it be making stuff up, but telling people enough to let them know it’s made up? Or will that just perpetuate a problem and keep sliding toward the line between journalism and fiction?
  • Should it get the heck out of this kind of “construction of reality,” in that it’s not ESPN’s gig, even if everyone else is doing it?
  • Should it find ways to use the digital technology that helped them do this in specific ways but not other ones?
  • Is there a different angle we’re missing?

What’s the male equivalent of “mistress” (or how does the media frame people who aren’t straight, white men)?

Today’s “Mass Com Monday” post takes a look at the idea of how the choices journalists make in their work can shape the way we see a person, an event or a concept. Broadly speaking, the idea of inclusion or exclusion of content to paint a specific picture is known as framing, a theory most journalism students learn about.

For example, let’s look at like Sunday’s Broncos/Commanders game: The Broncos led 21-3 early in the game. The Commanders scored enough points to take a 35-24 lead. The Broncos then scored twice to make the final score 35-33, after they failed in an attempt at a two-point conversion with no time left on the clock.

This could be framed as an epic comeback if you want to look at it from the point of view of the Commanders. It could be framed as an epic collapse if you looked at it from the Broncos side of the deal. You could also frame it based on the final play (Commanders held on to win/Broncos failed to complete the job and lost).

Framing isn’t always about picking a side, but in most cases, it’s about how the media can shape our view of thing, including bigger topics like race, gender and other social issues. Let’s look at one example of that:

In a long social media thread a friend had running about the trial of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a commenter noted how the Washington Post chose to lead a story on the prosecution’s most important witness:

Two women WaPo reporters crafted this lede:

AUSTIN — The star witness swept into the Texas Capitol on Wednesday, red coat and flashy Balenciaga-emblazoned handbag tucked under her arms, her white sheath, red lipstick and signature platinum pixie all a dramatic contrast from the somber-suited individuals who have testified for the past week in the historic impeachment trial of state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The star witness was Laura Olson, person who prosecutors said had an extended affair with Paxton. What she would bring to the table in terms of supporting the case against Paxton was unclear and eventually she was cut loose from having to testify.

What is clear, based on the thread and a general reading of how Olson has been portrayed, is that there is a heavy emphasis on her appearance. Her fashion and her physical being (sweeping in, being flashy etc.) are front and center.

It’s fair to say that this kind of framing wouldn’t be something you’d see in a description of a man in a situation like this.

Or as I put it, I’d hate to see how these esteemed journalists would have described me in that situation:

“The star witness awkwardly shuffled into court with the confidence of a drunk doing a field sobriety test, clad in a wardrobe likely abandoned outside a Goodwill by a homeless elf, his head shaped like a decaying russet potato with a horse shoe of graying mane around a shiny bald top that gave him the look of a cue ball wearing a hula skirt, a dramatic contrast to the other witnesses who clearly own mirrors and possess a sense of dignity…”

The authors also make some interesting choices on what to include, such as this tidbit about her shoes:

Olson arrived with her attorney in the morning, entering the Capitol rotunda and ducking into a restroom where she traded red, kitten-heel mules for tan pumps.

Wait! WAIT! Who is the fashion designer associated with these amazing pieces of footware? Were they Manolos? Louboutins? And did she go into a stall or was this done near the sink? Come ON, Washington Post! Are you committed to serious journalistic digging or not here?

And let’s look  at  how the authors framed her compare to how they framed Paxton in the realm of non-essential clauses: (I bolded certain spots for emphasis and clarity.)

 Paxton, a three-term incumbent reelected last year, has been among the state’s most prominent allies of former president Donald Trump. 

<SNIP>

According to her LinkedIn profile, which she took down earlier this year, the four-times-divorced mother of two previously worked as district director for Sen. Donna Campbell (R) in San Antonio.

(Question: How many kids does Ken Paxton have? You wouldn’t know from this  story. Or this one. Or this one. Or a dozen others. That said, he has four kids and two grandkids, in case you think that matters.)

And then toss this in:

Paxton has not been seen in the Senate chamber since he entered a not guilty plea on day one, though his wife of more than 35 years, Sen. Angela Paxton, has been ever-present.

The picture being painted here is this: Married, thrice-elected civil servant is accused of philandering with a mother of two who apparently can’t keep a man.

This is not the only article that focuses more on what Olson looks like than what she might have to say in Paxton’s impeachment trial. Here’s one where they really dig into the clothing choice, as well as the way her high heels click-clack around the Capitol. Maybe that’s why she made the strategic move to the tan pumps…

One other thing that came up in this discussion of the Olson/Paxton situation was how Olson was described as a “mistress.” The question came up: “Is there even a male equivalent for this term, which seems to admonish her as a man-stealing home-wrecker?” As much as we had trying to make a term (“man-stress” and “side-weiner” were two I particularly enjoyed contributing), we couldn’t find one. That says something about the framing and the English language…

The point is, when we see content like this, we have our views on people like Olson shaped in one way while we have our views of people like Paxton shaped another. That’s not to say a story should never describe someone’s appearance or clothing or that all people should be treated exactly the same. What this is saying is to examine how we treat people in the media and if there is inequitable treatment based that unfairly shifts the frame.

In writing, we talked about this before on the blog, and these lessons merit a second look. As consumers, however, it really pays to pay attention to these issues as well and how they frame our views.

EXERCISE TIME: Read some stories on topics that interest you and look for specific frames that you think shape how a reader would perceive a person, event or outcome. Also keep an eye out for stories that frame individuals based on issues of race, gender, social status, sexual orientation or other similar elements. What do these frames present and do you feel they are fair?

Also, can you imagine framing people of a different group in a similar way? For example, would a man’s clothing be described in as intricate detail as a woman’s was in an article? Or would a story on a rich person focus as much on their single-parent household as a story on a poorer person does? Are there words that apply only to one group and not another, like the term “mistress?”

A look at the impact of Artificial Intelligence on journalism and education now, and where it might lead in the future

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we’ll kick off the start of the academic year schedule with our “Mass Com Monday” post, geared toward a broader discussion for those folks doing intro classes or those looking for bigger topics to examine. I am apparently at the last university that still has yet to start classes, but since you all are going to work, we go to work on the blog.

If you like this content, style or approach, let me know. If not, let me know that, too, as this is a transition in progress for the blog.– VFF.)

A BRIEF RECAP: Artificial intelligence is nothing new, but its more recent applications in education and journalism have brought the topic to the forefront over the past year or so, when OpenAI released its ChatGPT. The chat bot could craft reasonably decent written copy that could lay waste to the ways in which we once thought of writing as a humans-only skill.

An Atlantic article in December that the ChatGPT and its successors would eliminate one tried-and-true way in which professors tested knowledge and skills, noting succinctly, “The College Essay is Dead.” Others took the new program for a spin in various educational environments, where it did quite well. One writer had it test Harvard’s freshman curriculum, where ChatGPT received a 3.34 GPA. It also passed the bar exam, did well in business school, and even rattled the cages of med schools with its work.

Journalism has some concerns with the AI issue, in that the ability to abuse the English language has long been the sole territory of ink-stained wretches. The Associated Press established some relatively clear guidelines about what it will or won’t allow when it comes to AI, so that should be one more thing students dread popping up on an AP Style test in the future.

In addition, at least a few publications along the Gannett chain have been keeping up with their work with the help of AI:

These briefs have repetition problems, structural issues and generally speaking no real source material to speak of to support any statements of opinion. In other words, we’re looking at about a “B/B-” effort in most intro to sports writing classes. (An Axios report early today noted Gannett’s Columbus Dispatch would be “pausing” this sports program, given reader backlash. No word on if their statement about pausing the program was written by an AI program.)

Given the general freakout about all this, it looks like we’re about six months from this happening…

Or maybe not…

THREE KEY THINGS PEOPLE FORGET ABOUT AI:

  • IT OPERATES OFF OF WHATEVER IS AVAILABLE: The concept of “garbage in, garbage out” is usually credited to IBM programmer George Fuechsel, who coined the term in the 1960s. Simply put, the computer (or any logic-based system) will do what it’s trained to do with whatever input it receives. If the input is good, the output will be good. If the input is crap, the output will be crap. To this point, ChatGPT and other similar programs have been the beneficiaries of a wide array of high-quality content from a vast group of sources. That might not always be the case and even if it is, ChatGPT might not know the difference.
    One major concern raised here is that ChatGPT doesn’t really distinguish between the work of high-quality sources that have created tomes of knowledge and chuckleheads who run blogs. Another is that, as ChatGPT continues to generate more and more content, it becomes a self-feeding loop, like a snake eating its own tail.
    At the point of its launch, any and all material online was the company’s oyster, because nobody really realized what these folks were doing at the time or how they were doing it. Now that folks are digging in a bit deeper, those open lanes on the information superhighway are likely to become restricted, thanks to copyright issues and the folks who own those copyrights. This leads us to…

 

  • COPYRIGHT OWNERS TEND TO GET TESTY WHEN PEOPLE STEAL THEIR STUFF: The folks running ChatGPT are already getting their first taste of what the legal battle could look like regarding copyright infringement issues regarding the training and output associated with this program.
    In the simplest of terms, copyright basically says the person who created a work owns the ability to do with that work whatever they see fit. If someone else takes that work and does something with it that you don’t want them to, you can seek some sort of restitution. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying this, but it’s the first week of classes or so and law won’t hit you until mid-semester at the earliest…)
    Several authors have already sued the tech company over the use of their work to help build this thing, as has comedy pro/author Sarah Silverman. The bigger concerns are coming down the road, as a class-action suit in California states that the OpenAI’s data scrapers violated  “terms of service agreements and state and federal privacy and property laws.”  In addition, the New York Times has put a blocker on the ChatGPT webscraper and is “mulling” a lawsuit against the company. (As a good friend used to say, “It ain’t a lawsuit until it’s filed,” but when an organization as big and powerful as the Times publicly ponders something like this, it’s at least a shot across the bow for OpenAI.)
    If this kind of thing continues, it could substantially limit the effectiveness of AI programs like ChatGPT and potentially force OpenAI to start the process over from scratch.

 

  • CHATGPT IS ONLY AS GOOD AS OUR FAITH IN IT: If you want to see an amazing look at how simply “believing” in something can both rocket something to stardom and crash the hell out of it in a few short months, watch John Oliver’s look at cryptocurrency and then come back here.
    As much as the people building and playing with ChatGPT might not want to believe it, this system fits that same mold: We use it because it does something for us that we think is good, but the minute we figure out that it might not be all that and a bag of chips, our faith in this thing can crater rapidly.
    According to the Washington Post, the “neat new toy” vibe of this thing is already starting to wane. Additionally, the earlier look at what the Columbus Dispatch has done in pulling out of the AI writing gig demonstrates that we’re not on the road to SkyNet quite yet.

DISCUSS AWAY: Consider a few angles for potential discussion about discussion in class from these angles:

  • BASICS:
    • To what degree have you played around with GPT? What’s your early sense of what it can do and what it can’t?
    • How and why would you or wouldn’t you use ChatGPT?
  • HISTORY:
    • Look back at some of the other “early innovator” elements associated with our media (Napster, Friendster, AskJeeves etc.) and see how each of them either started a revolution or fizzled out. What kind of pattern do you see for ChatGPT based on these previous efforts?
  • LAW:
    • Do copyright issues concern you generally speaking and do you have concerns about them as they relate to the ChatGPT situation?
    • Is there a way to balance the rights of copyright owners with the interests related to developing software like ChatGPT?
    • If these suits eliminate significant sources of quality material from which ChatGPT can draw, how confident would you be in using this kind of program?
  • ETHICS:
    • Given what you’ve seen about how ChatGPT can write essays and even get you through a freshman year at Harvard, how do you feel this could impact your education or the education of others in your peer group?
    • Is it fair to use a program like ChatGPT to do some of your work? If so, what kind and how much?