--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, April 10th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, who is responsible when artificial intelligence lies? A tale of two very different housing markets. And how one man figured out a way to beat a seemingly unbeatable casino game. But first, let's start with a few big stories from the weekend.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into apparent leaks of classified U.S. intelligence documents that were posted to social media in recent weeks, one of the largest leaks of its kind in a decade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The documents appear to have been prepared for senior Pentagon leaders and other personnel with appropriate security clearances. And they include details on relationships with key allies like Ukraine, including intelligence on battlefield conditions that show that Ukraine has a serious shortfall in Western-supplied weaponry.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Kiev's military leaders are reportedly unhappy about the leaks, and a senior Ukrainian official told The Washington Post they are worried about the possibility of more.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now let's turn to abortion access in the United States. On Friday, we got two opposing court rulings on mifepristone, a pill that's commonly used in medication abortions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One came from a federal judge in Texas who ruled the FDA was wrong to approve the drug 23 years ago and that medication abortion is not safe.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Decades of evidence say otherwise. The other ruling came from a federal judge in Washington state who said the drug is effective and safe and ordered the FDA to preserve access in 17 states and Washington, D.C.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At this moment, with these two contradicting rulings, nothing has changed. But Vox says the coming weeks will be critical. We'll find out whether appeals will send this issue to the Supreme Court.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's check in now on Tennessee and a story that we told you about last week. Two Black Democrats, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, who were expelled from the state legislature for participating in gun safety protests, are hoping to be reinstated.
--:-- Justin Jones: We will continue to fight for our constituents. This attack against us is hurting all people in our state. So it's not, you know, even though it's unfortunately impacting Black and Brown communities, this is hurting poor white people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They'll need to be reappointed, then elected back to their seats. Their colleagues will meet this week to decide on next steps.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, the 2023 Masters tournament ended yesterday with Spain's Jon Rahm earning the iconic green jacket for the very first time. It was his second major tournament victory.
--:-- Jon Rahm: We still battled out there, and what a great Sunday to see a couple of guys like Jordan and Phil, two past champions, come out, shoot a low score, and give us all a scare.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Because at one point, it definitely, you know, when I was in 10, they were finishing. A couple different ideas crossed my mind that I didn't want to think about.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This next story from The Washington Post asks an important question. Who is responsible when an artificial intelligence chatbot spits out misleading or inaccurate information about a real person?
--:-- Pranshu Verma: Recently, a law professor named Jonathan Turley received an email from a colleague who had asked ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone.
--:-- Pranshu Verma: The list had Turley's name on it. The response that came back basically said that Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska.
--:-- Pranshu Verma: That's according to a March 2018 article in The Washington Post, which cited as the source of evidence to prove that this was true.
--:-- Pranshu Verma: But there was a big problem because no such article in The Washington Post existed.
--:-- Pranshu Verma: Turley says he's never been accused of sexual harassment. He's never been on any kind of class trip to Alaska. And he doesn't work for the university ChatGPT said he does.
--:-- Pranshu Verma: Now he's not sure who should be held responsible for ChatGPT's false allegation. He calls this whole experience chilling.
--:-- Pranshu Verma: The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, says its chatbot may not always generate accurate answers, and it working to improve accuracy.
--:-- Pranshu Verma: Verma spoke to experts in online speech who say this is all new territory. And as big companies like Google and Microsoft start to integrate AI chatbots into their search engines, it's going to become more complicated to figure out whether your search results need some kind of fact check.
--:-- Pranshu Verma: As for accountability, Verma says it's hard to know how a lawsuit against the makers of an AI chatbot would play out in court.
--:-- Pranshu Verma: Defamation law in this case is one thing that people are trying to see well is this defamation is this information published is this coming from somebody that has a a mental state that is intending to harm somebody those are all very tricky questions that legal scholars are now only having to grapple with because they really haven't had the test case yet to kind of answer those questions, but now we will start seeing cases potentially work through the court.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There is an unusual pattern emerging in the U.S. housing market. In the East, home prices are rising in the biggest metropolitan areas, places like Chicago, Atlanta, and D.C.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And in Western cities, the opposite is playing out. Prices are dropping in major markets, including Seattle, Sacramento and San Jose.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Housing analysts say this kind of 50-50 split down the map is rare, potentially unprecedented.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Wall Street Journal looks into what's causing this, and it says housing markets are responding to several local factors, affordability, supply and job growth.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's start out west. Cities with ties to big tech have had some of the least affordable housing markets as they attracted so many high-earning workers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Over the last year, of course, tech companies have had big layoffs. Now we're seeing places like San Francisco and Seattle have some of the fastest falling home prices, down as much as 10 percent compared to last year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meanwhile, in the southeast, a hot housing market is attracting companies and adding jobs. In Miami, several financial companies have moved to the city in recent years and home prices are up 12 percent.
--:-- Letitia Grant: I'm the executive managing broker at TASS Realty Group in Houston. I am practically sitting on the dividing line of the east trend in the country right now.
--:-- Letitia Grant: We've been waiting since the pandemic. And you know, for real estate, six months is a long time. So imagine two years. We've been struggling. Our poor buyers, many of them renewed their lease for a minimum of a year. And now they're at a place where they can get back into the market and they're entering.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Many economists told the journal there have been more price drops than they expected. And they're predicting that home prices will continue to fall this spring or summer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But they say we probably won't see some kind of big national price collapse like we had after the subprime crisis. Because we still have a supply problem. A lower than normal number of homes for sale.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It was true before the pandemic, and now the number of active listings is well below pre-pandemic levels.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's end with a story about a man who figured out a system for winning a seemingly unbeatable casino game. Roulette is a game of chance. You spin the wheel and you get what you get.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Bloomberg describes a night in 2004 when a man named Nico Tosa and his friends walked into the Ritz Club Casino in London. And as Bloomberg describes it, this group played roulette almost as if they could see the future.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They placed unusually large bets and racked up some unbelievable streaks. They were winning consistently over hundreds of rounds.
--:-- Shamita Basu: After Tosa and his crew cashed out, police, lawyers, the casino staff, and roulette wheel engineers tried to figure out how they did it. But the case remained a mystery for almost two decades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One gambling executive told Bloomberg he still loses sleep over it. So how did Tosa do it? Well, Bloomberg spent six months investigating and ended up tracking down Tosa and asking him to explain himself.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It turns out he is quite a character. If you're listening in the Apple News app right now, you can hear all about it next. This Bloomberg story is queued up to play for you as a narrated article, so stick around to check that out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I am out for the next few days. My colleague Gideon Resnick will be here with you to bring you the news tomorrow.
