Reiteration is probably necessary.

https://pogowasright.org/a-letter-to-the-privacy-law-community-from-the-scholars-and-teachers-in-leadership/

A Letter to the Privacy Law Community from the Scholars and Teachers in Leadership

May 2, 2025

Dear Colleagues,

In our capacities as scholars, teachers, and leaders of the Privacy Law Scholars Foundation (PLSF) and the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC), we write to express our grave concern about ongoing threats to privacy and democracy in the United States.

Each of us brings different perspectives on what the law is and should be. Diversity in our views is one hallmark of the privacy law community. That diversity has made PLSC a vibrant incubator of cutting edge scholarship for nearly twenty years. Although we have different views on many things, we are resolute in our view that lawyers, elected officials, judges, and other government actors must abide by the rule of law. And although we approach the topic of privacy from many different angles, we all agree that privacy is of great and fundamental importance to the rule of law and to democracy in general.

Why is this necessary? Wouldn’t AI be covered under existing rules?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-judicial-panel-advances-proposal-regulate-ai-generated-evidence-2025-05-02/

US judicial panel advances proposal to regulate AI-generated evidence

A federal judicial panel advanced a proposal on Friday to regulate the introduction of artificial intelligence-generated evidence at trial, with judges expressing a need to swiftly get feedback from the public and lawyers on the draft rule to get ahead of a rapidly evolving technology.

The U.S. Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules in Washington, D.C., voted 8-1 in favor of seeking public comment on a draft rule designed to ensure evidence produced by generative AI technology meets the same reliability standards as evidence from a human expert witness.

Thinking for your AI.

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-in-high-stakes-litigation-the-critical-role-of-experienced-attorneys/

AI In High-Stakes Litigation: The Critical Role of Experienced Attorneys

Via LLRX – AI In High-Stakes Litigation: The Critical Role of Experienced Attorney – Skepticism about AI is not only justified—it’s evidence of good judgment. There are indeed pitfalls to AI use. Inept use of AI won’t help you, but my experience has been that in the hands of skilled lawyers with good judgment, AI is essential to obtaining the best results, for one simple reason: AI is only as good as the question it’s given. This is where senior lawyers excel. Knowing what issue to frame, what clause to focus on, what fact might tip the case—this is precisely what you’ve spent your career developing.  Jerry Lawson contends that AI can assist. But it still needs someone to think.

Change is hard.

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/05/law-firms-keep-buying-amazing-tech-lawyers-keep-not-using-it/

Law Firms Keep Buying Amazing Tech… Lawyers Keep Not Using It

The tech people are trying to make lawyering easier — or at least more profitable and secure — but their worst enemy remains the lawyers they aim to help.

“Purchase, install, ignore” remains a disturbingly common pattern for law firms. It’s not universal by any means. Some technology manages to strike a chord with attorneys and gets inserted into the workflow, but many products fail to break through with the masses to the frustration of tech professionals. And unfortunately the tech that manages to break through is often the least essential. So as firms chase the generative AI dragon, they’d do well to get their fundamental tech issues sorted first.

“Ground your legal AI strategy firmly in the basics” declares a new report from iManage. Hopefully the AI-curious will take a look, because the takeaway lurking under the glitzy “AI” in the headline is a plea for better adoption across the board. Especially for the more important tools that currently collect a lot of dust across the industry.

Similar to the conclusions reached in “The Dynamo and the Computer”

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/want-ai-driven-productivity-redesign-work/

Want AI-Driven Productivity? Redesign Work

To capitalize on the promises of artificial intelligence, leaders need to deconstruct jobs and processes, redeploy work, and reconstruct new ways of operating.

Darn! I was looking forward to this.

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/29/tariffs-amazon-prime-day-sellers-report

Amazon denies tariff pricing plan after White House calls it "hostile and political"

Amazon now denies reports it planned to list how much tariffs increased products' prices after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt slammed the move as a "hostile and political act."

Why it matters: The reported plan further suggests a growing rift between businesses and President Trump, who has made aggressive tariffs and a global trade war central to his economic agenda.

As I feared, AI is becoming the dominant influencer…

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/04/great-language-flattening/682627/

The Great Language Flattening

In at least one crucial way, AI has already won its campaign for global dominance. An unbelievable volume of synthetic prose is published every moment of every day—heaping piles of machine-written news articles, text messages, emails, search results, customer-service chats, even scientific research.

Chatbots learned from human writing. Now the influence may run in the other direction. Some people have hypothesized that the proliferation of generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT will seep into human communication, that the terse language we use when prompting a chatbot may lead us to dispose of any niceties or writerly flourishes when corresponding with friends and colleagues. But there are other possibilities. Jeremy Nguyen, a senior researcher at Swinburne University of Technology, in Australia, ran an experiment last year to see how exposure to AI-generated text might change the way people write. He and his colleagues asked 320 people to write a post advertising a sofa for sale on a secondhand marketplace. Afterward, the researchers showed the participants what ChatGPT had written when given the same prompt, and they asked the subjects to do the same task again. The responses changed dramatically.

Better or bitter?

https://coloradosun.com/2025/04/29/colorado-revisions-artificial-intelligence-law-consumer-protection/

Colorado lawmakers, being watched across the country, scale back artificial intelligence law

… Senate Bill 318 would reduce the administrative tasks smaller companies must take to protect consumers against discrimination if their AI systems are used to decide who gets a job, housing, personal loans, health care, insurance coverage, educational opportunities, or legal or essential government services. 

The measure also would delay implementation for about a year and make the resource-intensive parts of the AI law apply initially to companies with 500 or more employees worldwide, instead of 50 or more. That would step down gradually until April 1, 2029, when companies with fewer than 100 workers would be exempt.

Perspective?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/anthropic-mapped-claudes-morality-heres-what-the-chatbot-values-and-doesnt/

Anthropic mapped Claude's morality. Here's what the chatbot values (and doesn't)

… On Monday, Anthropic released an analysis of over 300,000 anonymized conversations between users and Claude, primarily Claude 3.5 models Sonnet and Haiku, as well as Claude 3. Titled "Values in the wild," the paper maps Claude's morality through patterns in the interactions that revealed 3,307 "AI values." 

… As a result, Anthropic discovered a hierarchical values taxonomy of five macro-categories: Practical (the most prevalent), Epistemic, Social, Protective, and Personal (the least prevalent) values. Those categories were then subdivided into values, such as "professional and technical excellence" and "critical thinking."

One way to point fingers?

https://punchbowl.news/archive/42925-am/#__amazontodisplaytariffcostsforconsumers__

Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

Amazon doesn’t want to shoulder the blame for the cost of President Donald Trump’s trade war.

So the e-commerce giant will soon show how much Trump’s tariffs are adding to the price of each product, according to a person familiar with the plan.

The shopping site will display how much of an item’s cost is derived from tariffs – right next to the product’s total listed price.

… It’s a bit of a risky move for Amazon. Going on offense against Trump-imposed tariffs may cause its 300 million active customers to direct their anger toward the administration and not the retailer. But it could also irk Trump, who isn’t afraid of retaliating.

No good deed goes unpunished.

https://www.theverge.com/news/657632/take-it-down-act-passes-house-deepfakes

Take It Down Act heads to Trump’s desk

The Take It Down Act is heading to President Donald Trump’s desk after the House voted 409-2 to pass the bill, which will require social media companies to take down content flagged as nonconsensual (including AI-generated) sexual images. Trump has pledged to sign it.

The bill is among the only pieces of online safety legislation to successfully pass both chambers in years of furor over deepfakes, child safety, and other issues — but it’s one that critics fear will be used as a weapon against content the administration or its allies dislike. It criminalizes the publication of nonconsensual intimate images (NCII), whether real or computer-generated, and requires social media platforms to have a system to remove those images within 48 hours of being flagged. In his address to Congress this year, Trump quipped that once he signed it, “I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”

Will this become common?

https://mustreadalaska.com/alaska-graduate-surveillance-legislation-passes-senate-under-guise-of-cell-phones-in-schools/

Alaska graduate surveillance legislation passes Senate under guise of ‘cell phones in schools’

An Alaska House of Representatives bill that was originally about cell phone use in schools has passed the Senate after being decorated with numerous amendments having nothing to do with cell phones.

One of those amendments to House Bill 57 has the State of Alaska tracking Alaska high school graduates for 20 years — until they are 38 years old.

Are lawyers on the way out?

https://theconversation.com/people-trust-legal-advice-generated-by-chatgpt-more-than-a-lawyer-new-study-252217

People trust legal advice generated by ChatGPT more than a lawyer – new study

People who aren’t legal experts are more willing to rely on legal advice provided by ChatGPT than by real lawyers – at least, when they don’t know which of the two provided the advice. That’s the key finding of our new research, which highlights some important concerns about the way the public increasingly relies on AI-generated content. We also found the public has at least some ability to identify whether the advice came from ChatGPT or a human lawyer.

Perspective.

https://jcss.ut.ac.ir/article_101594.html

Once Upon a Time and Research

Background: The nature of scholarly research has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades, transitioning from traditional, library-based inquiry to digitally mediated and increasingly AI-assisted methodologies. This article reflects on that evolution through an autoethnographic lens, drawing upon the author’s personal academic trajectory and long-standing engagement with satire.

Aims: This article explores the evolving landscape of research, communication, and authorship in the digital age, with a particular focus on the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence.

Methodology: The study employs a reflective, autoethnographic methodology combined with AI-assisted literature synthesis. Drawing on personal academic experiences and outputs from ChatGPT and Claude, the author critically examines artificial intelligence’s role in communication research and satire. This qualitative approach blends narrative inquiry with theoretical analysis to explore the epistemological and ethical implications of AI in scholarly authorship.

Discussion: Reflecting on a shift from traditional library-based scholarship to AI-assisted inquiry, the author critically examines how tools like ChatGPT and Claude reshape academic and journalistic practices. The manuscript considers the integration of AI across domains such as human communication, media, sentiment analysis, and translation, while addressing ethical concerns including privacy, authorship, and misinformation. Through both anecdotal reflection and synthesized research, the text interrogates the promises and pitfalls of AI in content generation, especially in the context of satire—a long-standing interest of the author.

Conclusion: Drawing on personal experience and historical theories of satire from figures like Northrop Frye, Juvenal, and Linda Hutcheon, the article positions AI not just as a technological tool but as a cultural force influencing narrative forms and critical thought. While acknowledging AI's generative capabilities, the author emphasizes the enduring need for human discernment, intellectual ownership, and critical interpretation in both academic and creative contexts.

Perspective.

https://academic.oup.com/jiplp/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jiplp/jpaf024/8115922

The contingencies of copyright and some big questions of our time

At the heart of the copyright debate in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI) lies a nagging question: will authorship remain the preserve of human creativity, or are we witnessing the emergence of a new, hybrid model of intellectual production that blurs the lines between human creativity and machine?

My intention is by no means to offer a definitive answer but rather to unpack the complexity of this question. By examining past and recent legal cases through a philosophical lens, I explore some of the key conceptual transformations that copyright has undergone in the late modern era, shifting from an anthropocentric logic to new environmental dynamics of networked technology.

Whether or not we are prepared to sacrifice our Promethean spark of creation—one of the key features that define us as human beings—the implications go far beyond copyright itself; they speak to the very core of what it means to write, read, create, and ultimately, to be human.

As a life-long fan of SciFi I can only agree!

https://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/AJSEE/article/view/82480

The Role of Science Fiction in Enhancing Critical Thinking and Ethical Imagination in Education

Science fiction is a powerful literary genre that fosters critical thinking, ethical reflection, and imaginative inquiry among students. This paper explores how science fiction encourages learners to question modern realities, envision future possibilities, and engage with complex technological and societal issues. Drawing on examples from authors such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula K. Le Guin, the study highlights how science fiction facilitates discussions on artificial intelligence, censorship, social structures, and human identity. The genre enables students to assess hypothetical scenarios, consider moral implications, and cultivate empathy by engaging with diverse perspectives and futuristic dilemmas. Science fiction is not merely entertainment; it is a vital educational tool that prepares students to think critically and creatively in a rapidly evolving world.