A section of anti-Israeli students at Columbia University are being criticised after they distributed a hateful newspaper, “The Columbia Intifada” on the campus, according to a report in the NY Post. The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group printed 1,000 copies of the broadsheet and handed it out to students on the campus of the Ivy League Institute. It contains at least half a dozen articles with titles including “Zionist Peace Means Palestinian Blood,” “The Myth of the Two-State Solution” and a handy “Guide to Wheatpasting” – a method of vandalising public surfaces with propaganda fliers or other messaging.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest, another anti-Israel group, took to Instagram to share pictures of the newspaper and urged students to pick up one of the copies.

“Hot off the press! Columbia SJP’s first ever print paper ‘The Columbia Intifada’ is available at today’s READ-IN at BUTLER LIBRARY 301!” read the post caption.

“We’re distributing 1,000 copies – get them while you can! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” it added.

The newspaper had no bylines or information connecting the articles to their respective authors.

Quizzed about the college’s name being used to publish such a newspaper, Columbia University distanced itself from the issue.

“Using the Columbia name for a publication that glorifies violence and makes individuals in our community feel targeted in any way is a breach of our values,” a school representative was quoted as saying by the outlet.

“As we have said repeatedly, discrimination and promoting violence or terror is not acceptable and antithetical to what our community stands for. We are investigating this incident through our applicable offices and policies.”

Republican New York Congressman Mike Lawler took to X9 formerly Twitter) and criticised the university for allowing the newspaper to be published and distributed.

“This is outrageous. If @Columbia cannot protect Jewish students on their campus, they should lose federal funding and have their tax-exempt status revoked,” Mr Lawler wrote.

“And for those students here on a visa engaged in an “intifada” against American students of the Jewish faith? Deport them,” he added.

This is outrageous.

If @Columbia cannot protect Jewish students on their campus, they should lose federal funding and have their tax-exempt status revoked.

And for those students here on a visa engaged in an “intifada” against American students of the Jewish faith? Deport them. https://t.co/6NtCPc4mDe

— Congressman Mike Lawler (@RepMikeLawler) December 6, 2024

Since the October 7 Hamas attacks and the subsequent response by Israel, Columbia University has been the epicentre for disruptive protests — often targeting Israel and Jews in particular.

What is intifada?

Chants of intifada have been heard during several protests at the US college campuses in the last year. Intifada in layman’s terms means an uprising or rebellion with the Palestinian side referring to it as a peaceful call to resist Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. However, Jews regard chants like “globalise the intifada” as calls for violence against them and the state of Israel.

There have been two intifadas in the Israel-Palestine conflict so far. Both the first intifada (1987-1993) and the second intifada (2000-2005) involved violence, bloodshed, terrorist attacks and loss of ordinary lives.

Paris, France:

The AI models that power chatbots and other applications still have difficulty distinguishing between nonsense and natural language, according to a study released on Thursday.

The researchers at Columbia University in the United States said their work revealed the limitations of current AI models and suggested it was too early to let them loose in legal or medical settings.

They put nine AI models through their paces, firing hundreds of pairs of sentences at them and asking which were likely to be heard in everyday speech.

They asked 100 people to make the same judgement on pairs of sentences like: “A buyer can own a genuine product also / One versed in circumference of highschool I rambled.”

The research, published in the Nature Machine Intelligence journal, then weighed the AI answers against the human answers and found dramatic differences.

Sophisticated models like GPT-2, an earlier version of the model that powers viral chatbot ChatGPT, generally matched the human answers.

Other simpler models did less well.

But the researchers highlighted that all the models made mistakes.

“Every model exhibited blind spots, labelling some sentences as meaningful that human participants thought were gibberish,” said psychology professor Christopher Baldassano, an author of the report.

“That should give us pause about the extent to which we want AI systems making important decisions, at least for now.”

Tal Golan, another of the paper’s authors, told AFP that the models were “an exciting technology that can complement human productivity dramatically”.

However, he argued that “letting these models replace human decision-making in domains such as law, medicine, or student evaluation may be premature”.

Among the pitfalls, he said, was the possibility that people might intentionally exploit the blind spots to manipulate the models.

AI models burst into public consciousness with the release of ChatGPT last year, which has since been credited with passing various exams and has been touted as a possible aide to doctors, lawyers and other professionals.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)