I don't recall anyone forcing me to have a social media account. If you are concerned about the harm it may do to you, there is a simple solution: don't use social media! Instead people seem to use it voraciously and then complain about the supposed harm it's doing. That doesn't make sense to me.

And who exactly do you feel is qualified to grant such authority?

Also don't forget that you use a lot of electricity in extracting oil and producing gasoline.

Rather than warning journalists that their phones may be compromised, why doesn't Apple instead patch the vulnerabilities so the phones won't be infected in the first place!?!?

Birth rate in the US is below replacement rate. Unless we take in more immigrants the US population will go the way Japan or South Korea are going right now. For example see this article

Or they could gradually phase out gas stations so there'd be no way to fill your tank. That way they wouldn't have to take your car away. You could have all the ICE cars you want; you just wouldn't be able to put gas in them!

My point was that one should criticize the articles themselves, not the fact that a computer rather than a human wrote them. Besides, I think the passage you quoted was just an observation that while many people might have basketballs and baseballs around the house, fewer people may have volleyballs, potentially meaning more effort may have to be made to get into the sport.

If the articles are informative, well-written, and enjoyable to read, what does it matter if they were written by a human, a computer, or a cat?

Are they filed under penalty of perjury? I don't think so.

Anyone else old enough to remember the early internet days when there was concern that objectionable or malicious material or software might enter a person's home through the internet and so people demanded some sort of filtering by ISPs, OS and browser developers, etc.? Technically minded people jokingly suggested extending the TCP/IP protocol to include an "evil bit" in the TCP header which indicates that a packet of data contains something undesirable. Criminals and other bad actors would set this evil bit in any "bad" material they send so filtering systems can use this to keep people out of harm's way. It sounds like this idea might need to be revived for AI.

Sure you can. It's just that in addition to not being able to vote, the "undesirables" would also have to pay a fine.

Have these guys heard of RSS?

It sounds like a really big concession on the part of the writers to let their works be used to train AI, but it is probably a pragmatic decision based on the fact that it would be all but impossible to know whether or not one's works were used in training AI systems. The union probably realized it would be impossible to verify that studios or others were not doing this, so they made it a concession to get other things in return.

I'm afraid they lost me after their "musical" episode.

As a previous poster commented, this bridge was on private property so the state couldn't have put up barriers or signs.