Business

Column: The AI industry has a battle-tested plan to keep using our content without paying for it

Published

1 year ago

January 12, 2024

Column: The AI industry has a battle-tested plan to keep using our content without paying for it

This time in 2023, the world was in thrall to the rise of OpenAI’s dazzling chatbot. ChatGPT was metastasizing like a fungal infection, amassing tens of millions of users a month. Multibillion-dollar partnerships materialized, and investments poured in. Big Tech joined the party. AI image generators like Midjourney took flight.

Just a year later, the mood has darkened. The surprise sacking and rapid reinstatement of OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman gave the company an embarrassing emperor-has-no-clothes moment. Profits are scarce across the sector, and computing costs are sky high. But one issue looms large above all and threatens to bring the fledgling industry back to earth: Copyright.

The legal complaints that cropped up throughout last year have grown into a thundering chorus, and the tech companies say they now present an existential threat to generative AI (the kind that can produce writing, pictures, music and so on). If 2023 was the year the world marveled at AI content generators, 2024 may be the year that the humans who created the raw materials that made that content possible get their revenge — and maybe even claw back some of the value built on their work.

In the last days of December, the New York Times filed a bombshell lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging that “millions of its articles were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.” The Times’ lawsuit joins a host of others — class-action lawsuits filed by illustrators, by the photo service Getty Images, by George R.R. Martin and the Author’s Guild, by anonymous social media users, to name a few — all alleging that companies that stand to profit from generative AI used the work of writers, reporters, artists and others without consent or compensation, infringing on their copyrights in the process.

Our experiments make it all but certain that these systems are in fact training on copyrighted material.

— Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus

Each of these lawsuits have their merits, but the Gray Lady’s entrance into the arena changes the game. For one thing, the Times is influential in shaping national narratives. For another, the Times lawsuit is uniquely damning; it’s loaded with example after example of how ChatGPT replicates news articles nearly verbatim, and offers the responses to its paying customers, free of attribution.

It’s not just the lawsuits: The heat is getting turned up by Congress, researchers and AI experts too. On Wednesday, a congressional hearing saw senators and media industry representatives agree that AI companies should pay licensing fees for the material they use to train their models. “It’s not only morally right,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D.-Conn.), who chairs the subcommittee that held the hearing, according to Wired. “It’s legally required.”

Meanwhile, a fiery study recently published in IEEE Spectrum, co-written by the cognitive scientist and AI expert Gary Marcus and the film industry veteran Reid Southern, shows that Midjourney and Dall-E, two of the leading AI image generators, were trained on copyrighted material, and can regurgitate that material at will — often without even being prompted to.

“Our experiments make it all but certain that these systems are in fact training on copyrighted material,” Marcus told me, something that the companies have been coy about copping to explicitly. “The companies have been far from straightforward in what they’re using, so it was important to establish that they are using copyrighted materials.” Also important: that the copyright-infringing works come spilling out of the systems with little prodding. “You don’t need to prompt it, to say ‘make C3P0’ — you can just say ‘draw golden droid.’ Or ‘Italian plumber’ — it will just draw Mario.”

This has serious implications for anyone using the systems in a commercial capacity. “The companies whose properties are infringed — Mattel, Nintendo — are going to take an interest in this,” Marcus says. “But the user is left vulnerable too — There’s nothing in the output that says what the sources are. In fact the software isn’t capable of doing that in a reliable way. So the users are on the hook and have no clue as to whether it’s infringing or not.”

There’s also a sense of momentum that’s beginning to build behind the simple notion that creators should be compensated for work that’s being used by AI companies valued at billions or tens of billions — or hundreds of billions of dollars, as Google and Microsoft are. The notion that generative AI systems are at root “plagiarism machines” has become increasingly widespread among their critics, and social media is teeming with opprobrium against AI.

But those AI companies aren’t likely to relent. We saw a foreshadowing of how the AI companies would respond to copyright concerns at large last year, when famed venture capitalist and AI evangelist Marc Andreessen’s firm argued that AI companies would go broke if they had to pay copyright royalties or licensing fees. Just this week, British media outlets reported that OpenAI has made the same case, seeking an exemption from copyright rules in England, claiming that the company simply couldn’t operate without ingesting copyrighted materials.

“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression — including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents — it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” OpenAI argued in its submission to the House of Lords. Note that both Andreessen and OpenAI’s statements underscore the value of copyrighted work in arguing that AI companies shouldn’t have to pay for it.

What can they do about it?

First, they’re pleading poverty. There’s just too much material out there to compensate everyone who contributed to making their system work and to making their valuation go through the roof. “Poor little rich company that’s valued at $100 billion can’t afford it,” Marcus says. “I don’t know how well that’s going to wash, but that’s what they’re arguing.”

The AI companies also argue what they’re doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use — probably the strongest argument they’ve got — because it’s transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database, and defeat claims that YouTube was profiting by allowing users to host and promulgate unlicensed material.

Next, the AI companies argue that copyright-violating outputs like those uncovered by Marcus, Southern and the New York Times are rare or are bugs that are going to be patched.

“They say, ‘Well this doesn’t happen very much. You need to do special prompting.’ But the things we asked it were pretty neutral — and we still got” copyrighted material, Marcus says. “This is not a minor side issue — this is how the systems are built. It is existential for these companies to be able to use this amount of data.”

Finally, aside from just making arguments in court and in statements, the AI companies are going to use their ample resources to lobby behind the scenes and throw their power around to help make their case.

Again, the generative AI industry isn’t making much money yet — last year was essentially one massive product demo to hype up the technology. And it worked: The investment dollars did pour in. But that doesn’t mean the AI companies have figured out ways to build a sustainable business model. They’re already operating under the assumption that they will not pay for things such as training materials, licenses or artists’ labor.

Of course, it is in no way true that the likes of Google, Microsoft, or even OpenAI cannot afford to pay to use copyrighted works — but Silicon Valley is at this point used to cutting labor and the cost of creative works out of the equation, and has little reason to think it would not be able to do so again. From Uber to Spotify, the business models of many of this century’s biggest tech companies have been built on the assumption that labor costs could be cut out or minimized. And when creative industries argued that YouTube allowed pirated and unlicensed materials to proliferate at the workers’ expense, and backed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) to fight it, Google was instrumental in stopping the bill, organizing rallies and online campaigns, and lobbying lawmakers to jump ship.

William Fitzgerald, a partner at the Worker Agency and former member of the public policy team at Google, tells me he sees a similar pressure campaign taking shape to fight the copyright cases, one modeled on the playbook Google has used successfully in the past: Marshaling third-party groups and organs such as the Chamber of Progress to push the idea that using copyrighted works for generative AI is not just fair use, but something that’s being embraced by artists themselves, not all of whom are so hung up on things like wanting to be paid for their work. He points to a pro-generative AI open letter signed by AI artists, that was, according to one of the artists involved, organized by Derek Slater, a former Google policy director whose firm works with Google — the same person who took credit for organizing the anti-SOPA efforts. Fitzgerald also sees Google’s fingerprints on Creative Commons’ embrace of the argument that AI art is fair use, as Google is a major funder of the organization.

“It’s worrisome to see Google deploy the same lobbying tactics they’ve developed over the years to ensure workers don’t get paid fairly for their labor,” Fitzgerald said. And OpenAI is close behind. It is not only taking a similar approach to heading off copyright complaints as Google, but it’s also hiring the same people: It hired Fred Von Lohmann, Google’s former director of copyright policy, as its top copyright lawyer.

“It appears OpenAI is replicating Google’s lobbying playbook,” he says. “They’ve hired former Google advocates to affect the same playbook that’s been so successful for Google for decades now.”

Things are different this time, however. There was real grassroots animosity against SOPA, which was seen at the time as engineered by Hollywood and the music industry; Silicon Valley was still widely beloved as a benevolent inventor of the future, and many didn’t see how having an artist’s work uploaded to a video platform owned by the good guys on the internet might be detrimental to their economic interests. (Though many did!)

Now, however, workers in the digital world are better prepared. Everyone from Hollywood screenwriters to freelance illustrators to part-time copywriters to full-time coders can recognize the potential material effect of a generative AI system that can ingest their work, replicate it, and offer it to users for a monthly fee — paid to a Silicon Valley corporation, not them.

“It’s asking for an enormous giveaway,” Marcus says. “It’s the equivalent of a major land grab.”

Now, there are many in Silicon Valley who are of course genuinely excited about the potential of AI, and many others who are genuinely oblivious to matters of political economy; who want to see the gains made as quickly as possible, and do not realize how these work-automating systems will be used in practice. Others may simply not care. But for those who do, Marcus says there’s a simple way forward.

“There’s an obvious alternative here — OpenAI’s saying that we need all this or we can’t build AI — but they could pay for it!” We want a world with artists and with writers, after all, he adds, one that rewards artistic work — not one where all the money goes to the top because a handful of tech companies won a digital land grab.

“It’s up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor,” Fitzgerald says. “Because if they don’t, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people’s labor and content for a long time to come.”

Business

4 Takeaways From the Arguments Before the Supreme Court in the TikTok Case

Published

6 hours ago

January 12, 2025

Press Room

4 Takeaways From the Arguments Before the Supreme Court in the TikTok Case

The Supreme Court on Friday grappled over a law that could determine the fate of TikTok, an enormously popular social media platform that has about 170 million users.

Congress enacted the law out of concern that the app, whose owner is based in China, is susceptible to the influence of the Chinese government and posed a national risk. The measure would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it by Jan. 19.

Here are some key takeaways:

The court appeared likely to uphold the law.

While the justices across the ideological spectrum asked tough questions of both sides, the overall tone and thrust appeared to suggest greater skepticism toward the arguments by lawyers for TikTok and its users that the First Amendment barred Congress from enacting the law.

The questioning opened with two conservative members of the court, Justice Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., suggesting that it was not TikTok, an American company, but its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, that was directly affected by the law.

Another conservative, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, focused on the risk that the Chinese government could use information TikTok is gathering on tens of millions of American teenagers and twentysomethings to eventually “develop spies, turn people, blackmail people” when they grow older and go to work for national security agencies or the military.

Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, asked why TikTok could not just create or buy another algorithm rather than using ByteDance’s.

And another liberal, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said she believed the law was less about speech than about association. She suggested that barring TikTok from associating with a Chinese company was akin to barring Americans from associating with foreign terrorist groups for national security reasons. (The Supreme Court has upheld that as constitutional.)

Still, several justices were skeptical about a major part of the government’s justification for the law: the risk that China might “covertly” make TikTok manipulate the content shown to Americans or collect user data to achieve its geopolitical aims.

Both Justice Kagan and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a conservative, stressed that everybody now knows that China is behind TikTok. They appeared interested in whether the government’s interest in preventing “covert” leveraging of the platform by a foreign adversary could be achieved in a less heavy-handed manner, like appending a label warning users of that risk.

Lawyers for TikTok and for its users argued that the law is unconstitutional.

Two lawyers argued that the law violates the First Amendment: Noel Francisco, representing both TikTok and ByteDance, and Jeffrey Fisher, representing TikTok users. Both suggested that concerns about potential manipulation by the Chinese government of the information American users see on the platform were insufficient to justify the law.

Mr. Francisco contended that the government in a free country “has no valid interest in preventing foreign propaganda” and cannot constitutionally try to keep Americans from being “persuaded by Chinese misinformation.” That is targeting the content of speech, which the First Amendment does not permit, he said.

Mr. Fisher asserted that fears that China might use its control over the platform to promote posts sowing doubts about democracy or pushing pro-China and anti-American views were a weaker justification for interfering in free speech than concerns about foreign terrorism.

“The government just doesn’t get to say ‘national security’ and the case is over,” Mr. Fisher said, adding, “It’s not enough to say ‘national security’ — you have to say ‘what is the real harm?’”

The Biden administration defended Congress’s right to enact the law.

The solicitor general, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, argued that Congress had lawful authority to enact the statute and that it did not violate the First Amendment. She said it was important to recognize that the law leaves speech on TikTok unrestricted once the platform is freed from foreign control.

“All of the same speech that’s happening on TikTok could happen post-divestiture,” she said. “The act doesn’t regulate that at all. So it’s not saying you can’t have pro-China speech, you can’t have anti-American speech. It’s not regulating the algorithm.”

She added: “TikTok, if it were able to do so, could use precisely the same algorithm to display the same content by the same users. All the act is doing is trying to surgically remove the ability of a foreign adversary nation to get our data and to be able to exercise control over the platform.”

The court appears unlikely to wait for Trump.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has asked the Supreme Court to issue an injunction delaying the law from taking effect until after he assumes office on Jan. 20.

Mr. Trump once shared the view that Chinese control of TikTok was an intolerable national security risk, but reversed course around the time he met with a billionaire Republican donor with a stake in its parent company.

If the court does uphold the law, TikTok would effectively be banned in the United States on Jan. 19, Mr. Francisco said. He reiterated a request that the court temporarily pause the law from taking effect to push back that deadline, saying it would “simply buy everybody a little breathing space.” It might be a “different world” for TikTok after Jan. 20, he added.

But there was scant focus by the justices on that idea, suggesting that they did not take it seriously. Mr. Trump’s brief requesting that the court punt the issue past the end of President Biden’s term so he could handle it — signed by his pick to be the next solicitor general, D. John Sauer — was long on rhetoric extolling Mr. Trump, but short on substance.

Business

'We will not be closing.' Amid the fires, employers and employees walk a fine line between work and safety

Published

7 hours ago

January 12, 2025

Press Room

'We will not be closing.' Amid the fires, employers and employees walk a fine line between work and safety

When Brigitte Tran arrived Wednesday morning at the Rodeo Drive boutique where she works as a sales associate, she was on edge.

Smoke from multiple wildfires raging across Los Angeles County billowed overhead. The luxury shopping corridor usually bustling with tourists appeared a ghost town.

Tran’s co-worker texted their boss to let her know neighboring stores had closed, and described the acrid smoke in the air. But the woman, at home in Orange County, did not seem to grasp their concerns. “We will not be closing unless the mall instructs us to close,” she replied.

Tran, who, fearing professional repercussions, asked that her place of work not be named, grew more anxious as the hours ticked by. Around 3 p.m., she and the two other employees working that day mutinied. They packed up, told the security guard to head home, and locked the doors a few hours before closing time.

As the wildfires have raged across Los Angeles County, choking the air, closing schools and forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate, employers and employees alike have had to manage a difficult balancing act between work and well being. Some employers responded swiftly to the crisis, shutting down offices and shifting to remote work, providing outdoor workers with masks and other protective equipment, and offering support for employees forced to evacuate. Others have been less adept, clumsy in their communications or wholly unmoved by worker concerns — sparking anger among their ranks as a result.

The fires have underscored the need for companies to have a clear plan in place to respond to emergencies, said Jonathan Porter, a meteorologist at private weather forecaster AccuWeather. The obligation, he said, goes beyond monitoring whether an office is in an evacuation zone. For example, as the current devastation unfolds, businesses should be aware of the “copious amounts of dangerous smoke that’s wafting into the air” and be prepared to provide outdoor workers with quality respirators or move them away from polluted air.

Some employers gave employees flexibility. Snap, the Santa Monica-based creator of the photo messaging app Snapchat, for example, kept its offices open on Wednesday but encouraged employees to work remotely, said a company spokesperson.

Others changed course after fielding criticism.

An announcement by UCLA that the campus would remain open for classes and regular operations on Wednesday drew anger from some instructors and students on social media.

Victor Narro, project director for the UCLA Labor Center and a lecturer on campus, said in a post on X he would ignore UCLA’s mandate and hold an optional class online.

“Students have been up all night panicked about sleeping through evacuation orders, winds still high, branches falling all over Westwood, power outages across city, & our new chancellor (on his 2nd day) thought this should be his first bold call…” wrote Nour Joudah, an assistant professor in UCLA’s Asian American Studies Department, in another X post.

That evening, UCLA changed course as conditions worsened, announcing it would close campus.

On Saturday, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk released a statement saying classes would be held remotely for at least another week and campus operations would be curtailed. “We ask for continued flexibility and understanding as we all work through these difficult times,” Frenk wrote.

But for many workers, the chaos of the last few dayshas left them feeling like they are fending for themselves.

Tim Hernandez, a driver with Amazon Flex, an on-demand Uber-like program in which people use their own cars to deliver packages, was assigned a route Tuesday along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu, which was rife with closures.

When he questioned whether making the delivery was safe, he said dispatchers at a Amazon facility in Camarillo brushed him off, leaving him to choose between concerns for his safety and worries that his rating in the Flex app would be hurt if he refused to go. He decided to try to make the deliveries, battling gusts of wind that knocked him over at one point. He lost cell signal, however, and was forced to return to the warehouse without completing the vast majority.

And when he arrived for his shift Tuesday, Alfred Muñoz, 43, an Amazon delivery driver who works out of a warehouse in the City of Industry, said he was handed an N95 mask but given little other instruction.

“It was just kind of business as usual,” Muñoz said.

High package counts and the number of stops on his assigned routes this week have made work even more difficult. On Tuesday, with wind gusts whipping debris around making it difficult to see, he had about 180 stops and 290 packages to deliver. On Thursday, the air thick with smoke and ash, he had more than 300 packages.

He woke up Thursday morning with a bloody nose and a sooty black crust in the corners of his eyes.

In response to a request for comment, Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company was “closely monitoring the wildfires across Southern California and adjusting our operations to keep our employees and those delivering for us safe.”

“If a driver arrives at a delivery location and the conditions are not safe to make a delivery, they are not expected to do so and the driver’s performance will not be impacted,” she said.

At the Brentwood location of popular Italian eatery Jon & Vinny’s, staff complained of headaches and sore throats in a text message group chat. An employee, who asked not to be named fearing retaliation at work, said that on Tuesday, staff huddled around an iPad with a fire map pulled up to keep an eye on the expanding evacuation zone. From the front of the restaurant, they could see the glow of the Palisades fire.

The employee said they were frustrated management kept the restaurant open when the perimeter of the mandatory evacuation zone was just two blocks away. On Wednesday, every server scheduled to work called in to say they were not coming, the employee said.

A spokesperson for Joint Venture Restaurant Group, which owns Jon & Vinny’s, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During natural disasters and extreme weather, employers’ choices can sometimes mean life or death, said David Michaels, a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health and a former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

He pointed to recent floods from Hurricane Helene that killed several workers at a plastics manufacturer. The tragedy has drawn scrutiny from state investigators, and a wrongful death lawsuit accuses the company of requiring employees to stay on site amid flooding after they requested permission to leave.

“It’s incumbent on employers to ensure the safety of their workers,” Michaels said. “The safety of their employees must take precedence over business concerns.”

Yasha Timenovich, 48, a driver for rideshare app Lyft and food delivery platform DoorDash, is more worried about declining earnings than on-the-job safety. With many restaurants and other businesses closed and would-be customers fleeing the city, he said that rides and deliveries have been slow. Traffic patterns have been strange and unpredictable with families piling into vehicles to flee fires.

Timenovich, who faced an order to evacuate his Hollywood apartment with his fiance and 6-year-old daughter Wednesday night, said he planned to stay with relatives for a few days in San Luis Obispo, where he hopes business will be better.

“I’m going to get out of here because it’s too crazy with these fires,” Timenovich said.

Business

Scott Bessent, Trump’s Billionaire Treasury Pick, Will Shed Assets to Avoid Conflicts

Published

14 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Scott Bessent, Trump’s Billionaire Treasury Pick, Will Shed Assets to Avoid Conflicts

Scott Bessent, the billionaire hedge fund manager whom President-elect Donald J. Trump picked to be his Treasury secretary, plans to divest from dozens of funds, trusts and investments in preparation to become the nation’s top economic policymaker.

Those plans were released on Saturday along with the publication of an ethics agreement and financial disclosures that Mr. Bessent submitted ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing next Thursday.

The documents show the extent of the wealth of Mr. Bessent, whose assets and investments appear to be worth in excess of $700 million. Mr. Bessent was formerly the top investor for the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros and has been a major Republican donor and adviser to Mr. Trump.

If confirmed as Treasury secretary, Mr. Bessent, 62, will steer Mr. Trump’s economic agenda of cutting taxes, rolling back regulations and imposing tariffs as he seeks to renegotiate trade deals. He will also play a central role in the Trump administration’s expected embrace of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

Although Mr. Trump won the election by appealing to working-class voters who have been dogged by high prices, he has turned to wealthy Wall Street investors such as Mr. Bessent and Howard Lutnick, a billionaire banker whom he tapped to be commerce secretary, to lead his economic team. Linda McMahon, another billionaire, has been picked as education secretary, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is leading an unofficial agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

In a letter to the Treasury Department’s ethics office, Mr. Bessent outlined the steps he would take to “avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest in the event that I am confirmed for the position of secretary of the Department of Treasury.”

Mr. Bessent said he would shutter Key Square Capital Management, the investment firm that he founded, and resign from his Bessent-Freeman Family Foundation and from Rockefeller University, where he has been chairman of the investment committee.

The financial disclosure form, which provides ranges for the value of his assets, reveals that Mr. Bessent owns as much as $25 million of farmland in North Dakota, which earns an income from soybean and corn production. He also owns a property in the Bahamas that is worth as much as $25 million. Last November, Mr. Bessent put his historic pink mansion in Charleston, S.C., on the market for $22.5 million.

Mr. Bessent is selling several investments that could pose potential conflicts of interest including a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund; an account that trades the renminbi, China’s currency; and his stake in All Seasons, a conservative publisher. He also has a margin loan, or line of credit, with Goldman Sachs of more than $50 million.

As an investor, Mr. Bessent has long wagered on the rising strength of the dollar and has betted against, or “shorted,” the renminbi, according to a person familiar with Mr. Bessent’s strategy who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his portfolio. Mr. Bessent gained notoriety in the 1990s by betting against the British pound and earning his firm, Soros Fund Management, $1 billion. He also made a high-profile bet against the Japanese yen.

Mr. Bessent, who will be overseeing the U.S. Treasury market, holds over $100 million in Treasury bills.

Cabinet officials are required to divest certain holdings and investments to avoid the potential for conflicts of interest. Although this can be an onerous process, it has some potential tax benefits.

The tax code contains a provision that allows securities to be sold and the capital gains tax on such sales deferred if the full proceeds are used to buy Treasury securities and certain money-market funds. The tax continues to be deferred until the securities or money-market funds are sold.

Even while adhering to the ethics guidelines, questions about conflicts of interest can still emerge.

Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary during his first term, Steven Mnuchin, divested from his Hollywood film production company after joining the administration. However, as he was negotiating a trade deal in 2018 with China — an important market for the U.S. film industry — ethics watchdogs raised questions about whether Mr. Mnuchin had conflicts because he had sold his interest in the company to his wife.

Mr. Bessent was chosen for the Treasury after an internal tussle among Mr. Trump’s aides over the job. Mr. Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s transition team co-chair and the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, made a late pitch to secure the Treasury secretary role for himself before Mr. Trump picked him to be Commerce secretary.

During that fight, which spilled into view, critics of Mr. Bessent circulated documents disparaging his performance as a hedge fund manager.

Mr. Bessent’s most recent hedge fund, Key Square Capital, launched to much fanfare in 2016, garnering $4.5 billion in investor money, including $2 billion from Mr. Soros, but manages much less now. A fund he ran in the early 2000s had a similarly unremarkable performance.