Friday, August 22, 2025

Worth watching?

https://www.bespacific.com/a-video-guide-for-teaching-law-students-to-use-ai-wisely/

A Video Guide for Teaching Law Students to Use AI Wisely

Lande, John, A Video Guide for Teaching Law Students to Use AI Wisely (August 21, 2025). University of Missouri School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2025-38, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5400065 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5400065

This article introduces a video that provides practical guidance about using artificial intelligence (AI) in legal education. It presents a basic introduction to AI and describes how law students and faculty can benefit from tools like ChatGPT. Because many students already use AI on their own, the video emphasizes the need to teach them how to use it wisely and responsibly. The video also includes demonstrations showing how faculty can use AI to develop new simulations and how students can use it to prepare for them. This article provides links to the video, PowerPoint slides, the chat transcript, and related resources. Finally, the article describes RPS Coach, a specialized AI tool trained on dispute resolution and legal education resources.”

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbYAcpfcf2E





I might be willing to come out of retirement.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/congressman_proposes_bringing_back_letters/

Congressman proposes bringing back letters of marque for cyber privateers

Bill would let US President commission white hat hackers to go after foreign threats, seize assets on the online seas





Signaling that ‘loyal followers’ have his support?

https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2025/08/21/trump-threat-colorado-tina-peters

Trump threatens "harsh measures" against Colorado if Tina Peters is not freed from prison

President Trump is once again demanding that Colorado officials "free" former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters from prison, this time adding a threat to "take harsh measures" if she is not let go.

Why it matters: The remark, made Thursday on his Truth Social platform, is the latest attempt by Trump to intervene on behalf of Peters, one of the nation's most prominent 2020 election deniers.



Thursday, August 21, 2025

Complex.

https://www.bespacific.com/the-dangerous-legal-strategy-coming-for-our-books/

The Dangerous Legal Strategy Coming for Our Books

The Atlantic – Our picture book was pulled from library shelves in Florida [no paywall]: The argument being used to defend the ban threatens the right to read. By Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. “In 2023, our book was one of thousands pulled from library shelves around the country, and as we write, an evolving legal strategy being used to defend many such bans threatens to upend decades of precedent preserving the right to read. The danger this doctrine poses to free speech should worry us all—even those who would rather their children not learn about gay penguins. In Tango, a pair of male chinstrap penguins in the Central Park Zoo become parents when a kindhearted zookeeper gives them an egg to hatch. (The story is both true and personal to us; when we wrote it, we were also trying to have a child.) Tango turned 20 in June, and for many of its years in print, it has been one of the most frequently challenged books in America. But until recently, it had never actually been removed from the collection of a public-school library, or any public library for that matter. That’s because of a 1982 Supreme Court decision establishing that freedom of speech includes the right to access the speech of others through their books. Every challenge to a public-library book since has been subject to the Court’s ruling that officials may not remove a book simply because they disagree with its viewpoint. Things started to change for us when a teacher in Escambia County, Florida, complained that the goal of Tango was the “indoctrination” of students through an “LGBTQ agenda using penguins.” A committee responsible for reviewing educational materials for the county disagreed, concluding that the story teaches valuable lessons about science and tolerance and is appropriate for students of all ages. But the school board balked at the book’s message of acceptance. As one board member put it, “The fascination is still on that it’s two male penguins raising a chick.” Escambia pulled Tango from its school libraries, which serve roughly 40,000 children…”

We sued Escambia in federal court for viewpoint discrimination (the case is ongoing). In casting about for a way to defend the ban, the school board landed on the theory that library books represent “government speech.” The government, the board explained, has its own First Amendment rights and must be allowed to speak as it wishes. Thus, it can remove any library book it finds objectionable for any reason. When we first heard this argument, we thought it was absurd. But government-speech doctrine is not new. It was invoked by the Supreme Court in 2009, for example, to allow a Utah town to refuse to install a religious monument in a public park, and again in 2015 to permit the state of Texas to refuse to issue certain specialty license plates. Roughly speaking, the doctrine holds that any action deemed “government speech” is immune to the First Amendment claims of those whose speech is being censored. No court had ever found that library books represent government speech before May of this year, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit swept aside decades of precedent, including its own previous decisions, to allow the removal of 17 books—Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, and Jazz Jennings’s Being Jazz, among others—from the public libraries of Llano County, Texas. Seven judges in the majority agreed that “a library’s collection decisions are government speech and therefore not subject to Free Speech challenge.” And with that, the books were gone…”





If I remember correctly, that was always the goal.

https://thenextweb.com/news/rise-of-zero-workforce-startups

The next unicorn might not hire anyone

A decade ago, startups often equated success with rapid headcount growth. The formula was simple: build a product, raise a round, hire fast. Bigger teams meant bigger bets. But the rulebook is getting rewritten as a new generation of startups scales with leaner teams and fewer people. They’re not building out sprawling customer support or sales teams, and seem to be automating what once warranted entire departments. Their growth is quite remarkable.

Cursor, which became the fastest-growing SaaS company in history, generated $200mn in revenue with 30 employees. Midjourney made $200mnn with 40Ben Lang’s site Tiny Teams tracks these small-but-mighty operators, with several emerging from Europe too. Sweden’s Lovable has a 25-strong team and achieved a $1.8bnn valuation just over six months after launching. Vlayer Labs, headquartered in Warsaw, secured $10mnn in pre-seed funding with 20 employees, while Berlin-based Juna AI raised $7.5mn with a seven-person team.





Can AI pick an idea out of a forest of words?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02616-5

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks

In February, Gupta and Pruthi reported3 that they’d found multiple examples of AI-generated manuscripts that, according to external experts they consulted, used others’ ideas without attribution, although without directly copying words and sentences.

Gupta and Pruthi say that this amounts to the software tools plagiarizing other ideas — albeit with no ill intention on the part of their creators. “A significant portion of LLM-generated research ideas appear novel on the surface but are actually skillfully plagiarized in ways that make their originality difficult to verify,” they write.

The issue of ‘idea plagiarism’, although little discussed, is already a problem with human-authored papers, says Debora Weber-Wulff, a plagiarism researcher at the University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, and she expects that it will get worse with work created by AI. But, unlike the more familiar forms of plagiarism — involving copied or subtly rewritten sentences — it’s hard to prove the reuse of ideas, she says.

That makes it difficult to see how to automate the task of checking for true novelty or originality, to match the pace at which AIs are going to be able to synthesize manuscripts.

There’s no one way to prove idea plagiarism,” Weber-Wulff says.





Tools & Techniques. (Lessons for the paranoid.)

https://www.bespacific.com/burner-phone-101-workshop/

Burner Phone 101 Workshop

Rebecca Williams: “In August 2025, I hosted a Burner Phone 101 Workshop at the Brooklyn Public Library. [The link to the full text PDF of the program is here.]  Below is a summary of the workshop with key points in bold and additional resources that participants helped crowdsource. Before the workshop began, we set the collective tone by sharing the goals, secret goals, and anti-goals. This helped participants know what to expect, created space for deeper learning, and reinforced the boundaries that kept the workshop safe and supportive. The goals were to learn about burner phones and have fun. The secret goals were to learn the limits of burner phones, connect them to broader digital privacy practices, and build confidence to share these lessons with loved ones. The anti-goals were just as important: do not share sensitive personal information and avoid framing these tools in ways that promote harm, harassment, or abuse.  Know Your Risks – Many people carry a general sense of feeling unsafe, but it can be hard to name the specific fears or what those fears would affectuate if realized. That is why we framed risk modeling as the foundation for using a burner phone, built on three core questions:

  • What are you trying to protect?

  • Who are you protecting it from?

  • What happens if it fails?

Without this clarity, it is easy to end up applying a laundry list of privacy best practices that do not fit your needs and to miss the protections that actually matter. We applied the framework to four scenarios: attending a protest, being present at an ICE raid, facing harassment, and even protecting yourself from yourself in cases like phone addiction (which is also valid). We emphasized the need to work backwards from what you are protecting and from whom, and we also stressed considering the risks to others in your network, not only your own…”



Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Maybe no longer concerned?

https://www.foxnews.com/media/white-house-launches-official-tiktok-account-trump-featured-prominently-debut-video

White House launches official TikTok account with Trump featured prominently in debut video

From Pennsylvania Avenue to your For You page, the White House launched its official TikTok account on Tuesday afternoon.

The verified account @whitehouse garnered thousands of followers within less than an hour. The bio reads "Welcome to the Golden Age of America."

President Donald Trump is front and center in the White House's first video, which is captioned, "America we are BACK! What’s up TikTok?"

In a statement, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said: "The Trump administration is committed to communicating the historic successes President Trump has delivered to the American people with as many audiences and platforms as possible. 





How does this help?

https://www.levernews.com/the-plot-to-outlaw-ai-lawsuits/

The Plot To Outlaw AI Lawsuits

Only weeks after the tech industry tried and failed to convince federal lawmakers to shield artificial intelligence companies from regulation, a bipartisan group of pro-business lawmakers is spearheading state legislation that would prohibit consumers from suing businesses whose AI potentially violates consumer protection laws. 

In recent years, companies have been accused of using AI technologies for a variety of unfair and discriminatory practices, from increasing airline fares and raising rents to price-gouging consumers and denying medical care.

Under pressure from tech giants after their legislative loss in Washington, Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis has called an emergency session of his state’s legislature to take up legislation that would weaken state AI regulations passed last year. One of the bills slated to be introduced in the session is framed as establishing that AI systems must comply with state consumer protection laws — something that some experts say is already required.

But the bill would also strip individuals of their right to sue AI businesses that potentially violate the Colorado Consumer Protection Act — a law meant to guard consumers against deceptive and unfair business practices. Instead, only the state’s Attorney General would be permitted to bring such cases under the law. 



Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Until they contradict the President?

https://www.bespacific.com/sec-launches-new-statistics-and-data-visualizations-webpage/

SEC Launches New Statistics and Data Visualizations Webpage

Today, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced a new statistics and data visualization page that includes statistics and graphics on key elements of the capital markets, such as initial public offerings, exempt offerings, corporate bond offerings, reporting issuers, municipal advisors, transfer agents, and household participation in the capital markets. The webpage provides statistics presented in time series charts to show market trends, pie charts to show distribution across different categories, as well as heat maps to show geographic distributions. The visuals are interactive, allowing the public to explore the information in which they are interested. 





Change has more than one point of failure…

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025a new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, reveals that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, most initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth are falling flat.

Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L.



Monday, August 18, 2025

Mastering AI.

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-agents-and-the-law/

AI Agents and the Law

AI Agents and the Law. Mark O. Riedl, Deven R. Desai. arXiv – AAAI Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

As AI becomes more “agentic,” it faces technical and socio-legal issues it must address if it is to fulfill its promise of increased economic productivity and efficiency. This paper uses technical and legal perspectives to explain how things change when AI systems start being able to directly execute tasks on behalf of a user. We show how technical conceptions of agents track some, but not all, socio-legal conceptions of agency. That is, both computer science and the law recognize the problems of under-specification for an agent, and both disciplines have robust conceptions of how to address ensuring an agent does what the programmer, or in the law, the principal desires and no more. However, to date, computer science has under-theorized issues related to questions of loyalty and to third parties that interact with an agent, both of which are central parts of the law of agency. First, we examine the correlations between implied authority in agency law and the principle of value-alignment in AI, wherein AI systems must operate under imperfect objective specification. Second, we reveal gaps in the current computer science view of agents pertaining to the legal concepts of disclosure and loyalty, and how failure to account for them can result in unintended effects in AI ecommerce agents. In surfacing these gaps, we show a path forward for responsible AI agent development and deployment.





Tools & Techniques.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/grammarlys-new-ai-agents-can-detect-ai-text-and-find-citations-for-you-automatically/

Grammarly's new AI agents can detect AI text and find citations for you - automatically

The company has launched eight new automated assistants to help students and working professionals hone their writing skills.



Sunday, August 17, 2025

Innovate then litigate?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5383935

The Litigation Solution: Why Courts, Not Code Mandates, Should Address AI Discrimination

As artificial intelligence systems increasingly influence decisionmaking in high-stakes sectors, policymakers have focused on regulating model design to combat algorithmic bias. Drawing on examples from the European Union's AI Act and recent state legislation, this Article critiques the emerging "fairness by design" paradigm. It argues that design mandates rest on a flawed premise: that bias can be objectively defined and mitigated ex ante without compromising competing values such as accuracy, privacy, or innovation. In reality, efforts to engineer fairness through prescriptive regulation risk distorting markets, entrenching incumbents, and stifling technological advancement. Moreover, the opaque, evolving nature of AI systems—especially generative models—makes it difficult to anticipate or eliminate future biases through design alone, often creating tradeoffs that regulators are ill-equipped to manage.

Rather than regulating AI inputs, the Article advocates for a litigation-first approach that focuses on AI outputs and leverages existing antidiscrimination law to address harms as they arise. By applying traditional disparate treatment and disparate impact frameworks to AI-assisted decisions, courts can assess when biased outcomes rise to the level of unlawful discrimination—without prematurely constraining innovation or imposing rigid mandates. This model mirrors America’s historical preference for permissive innovation, allowing technology to evolve while holding bad actors accountable under general principles of law. The result is a more flexible, targeted regulatory regime that fosters AI development while safeguarding civil rights.



Saturday, August 16, 2025

A persistent question: Is this a preparation for war?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/15/typhoonadjacent_chinese_crew_taiwan_web_servers/

Typhoon-adjacent Chinese crew broke into Taiwanese web host

A suspected Chinese-government-backed cyber crew recently broke into a Taiwanese web hosting provider to steal credentials and plant backdoors for long-term access, using a mix of open-source and custom software tools, Cisco Talos reports.





Tools & Techniques. (Is this cheating?)

https://www.makeuseof.com/back-to-school-ai-tools/

These Are the Best Free AI Tools for Anyone Heading Back to School

With AI now, the back-to-school season feels a lot different than it used to, in the best way possible. There are a bunch of free AI tools out there that you should be using for studying smarter, and there's no better time to start exploring them than right now.