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The Thought Provoker:

Shawn is up first this week. Eight regional daily newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement yesterday, the latest in an industrywide reckoning with the rise of content-dependent artificial intelligence. News publishers like The New York Times have sued OpenAI for using their journalism to train its models, arguing repackaging original journalism is not a fair use. Other media companies are opting to sign deals with AI companies to pay to license their content, including The Associated Press and Reuters. Reports indicate OpenAI is paying individual publishers $1M to $5M annually for such access. Is this not a demonstration of how free market solutions combined with a fair justice system produce productive and profitable outcomes much more efficiently than government regulations can? 

Next up, Sam.  LDS culture intruding on church doctrine.

Finally, Matt.  Gallup recently released a survey that shows that only 30% of Americans are engaged at work. This is an 11 year low of employee engagement in the United States. From 2012 until 2020, employee engagement was on a steady increase. At the same time, employee engagement in the year 2000 was only 26%. So my question is, should we be concerned about the decline in employee engagement at work, or should employers get used to the idea that only about ¼  to 1/3 of their employees are actually going to be engaged while they're at work?

The Big Question: Each year, Gallup releases the Rating World Leaders report, which details the rise — or fall — in leading world powers' job approval ratings across the globe. Last month, for fun, I did a little survey of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in which I asked them to rank prophets from best to worst. I haven't analyzed the results yet, and I don't think that I will share the results, but my question is… Is it appropriate to rank prophets in the same way that we rank world leaders?