Now I have a word for it… (Might also apply to politicians.)

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-and-semantic-pareidolia-when-we-see-consciousness-where-there-is-none/

AI and Semantic Pareidolia: When We See Consciousness Where There Is None

Floridi, Luciano, AI and Semantic Pareidolia: When We See Consciousness Where There Is None (June 18, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5309682 – “The article introduces the concept of “semantic pareidolia” – our tendency to attribute consciousness, intelligence, and emotions to AI systems that lack these qualities. It examines how this psychological phenomenon leads us to perceive meaning and intentionality in statistical pattern-matching systems, similar to seeing faces in clouds. It analyses the converging forces intensifying this tendency: increasing digital immersion, profit-driven corporate interests, social isolation, and AI advancement. The article warns of progression from harmless anthropomorphism to problematic AI idolatry, and calls for responsible design practices that help users maintain critical distinctions between simulation and genuine consciousness. It is the English translation and adaptation of an article originally published in Italian in Harvard Business Review Italia, June 2025.”

Is “I didn’t get most of the votes, therefore it must be rigged” sufficient to bring charges?

https://www.bespacific.com/justice-dept-explores-using-criminal-charges-against-election-officials/

Justice Dept. Explores Using Criminal Charges Against Election Officials

The New York Times: “Senior Justice Department officials are exploring whether they can bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the Trump administration determines they have not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems, according to people familiar with the discussions. The department’s effort, which is still in its early stages, is not based on new evidence, data or legal authority, according to the people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. Instead, it is driven by the unsubstantiated argument made by many in the Trump administration that American elections are easy prey to voter fraud and foreign manipulation, these people said. Such a path could significantly raise the stakes for federal investigations of state or county officials, thrusting the Justice Department and the threat of criminalization into the election system in a way that has never been done before. Federal voting laws place some mandates on how elections are conducted and ballots counted. But that work has historically been managed by state and local officials, with limited involvement or oversight from Washington…”

No surprise.

https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/new-judges-ruling-makes-openai-keeping-a-record-of-all-your-chatgpt-chats-one-step-closer-to-reality

New judge’s ruling makes OpenAI keeping a record of all your ChatGPT chats one step closer to reality

OpenAI will be holding onto all of your conversations with ChatGPT and possibly sharing them with a lot of lawyers, even the ones you thought you deleted. That's the upshot of an order from the federal judge overseeing a lawsuit brought against OpenAI by The New York Times over copyright infringement. Judge Ona Wang upheld her earlier order to preserve all ChatGPT conversations for evidence after rejecting a motion by ChatGPT user Aidan Hunt, one of several from ChatGPT users asking her to rescind the order over privacy and other concerns.

Judge Wang told OpenAI to “indefinitely” preserve ChatGPT’s outputs since the Times pointed out that would be a way to tell if the chatbot has illegally recreated articles without paying the original publishers. But finding those examples means hanging onto every intimate, awkward, or just private communication anyone's had with the chatbot. Though what users write isn't part of the order, it's not hard to imagine working out who was conversing with ChatGPT about what personal topic based on what the AI wrote. In fact, the more personal the discussion, the easier it would probably be to identify the user.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-prove-your-writing-isnt-ai-generated-with-grammarlys-new-tool/

How to prove your writing isn't AI-generated with Grammarly's free new tool

… If you use Google Docs or MS Office and Grammarly, there's a new feature that could be of assistance. That feature is called Track Your Work, and it's now built right into Grammarly. Even better, the feature is available in the free Grammarly account.

Essentially, this feature automatically records proof of your writing activity for all new Google and Word Docs. It's important to understand that this feature is only for new documents. If you open a document that has already been written, you cannot enable the feature because, well, that document has already been written or is in the process of being written.

This feature is a part of Grammarly Authorship, which enables you to demonstrate your sources of text in either a Google Doc or Microsoft Word document. Once you enable the feature, Authorship tracks your writing process and automatically categorizes the source of text as you type.

Upgrade laws to keep pace with technology? What a concept!

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/02/uk_cable_sabotage_law/

UK eyes new laws as cable sabotage blurs line between war and peace

Cyberattacks and undersea cable sabotage are blurring the line between war and peace and exposing holes in UK law, a government minister has warned lawmakers.

Earlier this year, the UK government published a Strategic Defence Review, which proposes a new bill to cover the prospect of state-sponsored cybercrime and subsea cable attacks.

In January, Sweden committed forces to the Baltic Sea following a suspected Russian attack on underwater data cables, one of a number of incidents.

Speaking to the National Security Strategy (Joint Committee) yesterday, Ministry of Defence parliamentary under-secretary Luke Pollard admitted that the Submarine Telegraph Act 1885 – which can impose £1,000 fines – "does seem somewhat out of step with the modern-day risk."

Perspective.

https://newrepublic.com/article/197403/transcript-trump-screwing-voters-mind-boggling-new-scam

Transcript: Trump Is Screwing His Voters in “Mind-Boggling” New Scam

An economist explains how the sum total of Trump’s policies are hitting working-class voters, especially his own, with a mix of deception and upward redistribution that constitutes something new and unprecedented.

Perspective.

https://www.bespacific.com/recent-trends-in-legal-ai-a-comprehensive-review/

Recent Trends in Legal AI: A Comprehensive Review

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is transforming legal firms by enhancing legal text analysis, legal document management, and judicial decision prediction. Conventional rule-based and statistical methods lack the contextual understanding, and scalability required for processing complex legal texts, while deep learning and transformer-based models have revolutionized advanced Legal Artificial Intelligence (LegalAI) technologies. Large Language Models (LLMs), including BERT, GPT, LLaMA, and domain-specific transformers like Legal-BERT and CaseLaw-BERT, have refined the state-of-art models in legal NLP tasks like legal text classification, legal text summarization, and judgment prediction.  This study analyzes 40 selected journals and conference papers from 2017 to 2024, emphasizing the developing research interest in LLM-based legal applications. Major developments consist of hierarchical transformers, rhetorical role classification, and legal knowledge graphs that facilitate legal text parsing and logical inference. This paper spans intellectual breakthroughs with real-world applications by reviewing LLMs and Knowledge Graphs (KG) for legal NLP, providing key findings for scholars and experts working on AI-driven legal systems.

Published in: 2025 Third International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Sustainable Systems (ICAISS)

Date of Conference: 21-23 May 2025

Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 24 June 2025

DOI: 10.1109/ICAISS61471.2025.11042154

Perspective.

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/trumps-diplomatic-model/

Trump’s Diplomatic Model

U.S. President Donald Trump has developed a clear model for exercising diplomacy. He begins by making demands of other nations, then calls for negotiations. If the negotiations do not take place or fail to produce some kind of accommodation, he takes punitive action. All the while, he alternatively issues threats meant to intensify the process or encourages action by praising his antagonist.

… Then there is the case of Russia and Ukraine. The negotiation process started with yet another shock – this time to Ukraine, when Washington said it was prepared to reduce, if not abandon, its support for Kyiv. Trump then sought to open negotiations with Russia with a stunning desire for a settlement at Ukraine’s expense. The purpose of the shock was to ease Russia’s anxieties over its performance in Ukraine and to indicate that the United States was not going to take advantage of those anxieties. In fact, Washington wanted Moscow to know it was prepared to offer economic benefits to Russia. Trump demanded talks to end the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin learned three things from this initial volley: that the U.S. was indifferent to the future of Ukraine, that Putin’s military failure in Ukraine was unacceptable, and that Trump’s indifference to Ukraine’s future (and his hostility toward NATO) gave Putin time to improve his position in Ukraine. In other words, Putin could not allow the war to end based on his meager successes. He regarded the U.S. stance on NATO (and Trump’s eagerness to settle) as an opportunity.

So we will see thousands of identical lawsuits?

https://www.bespacific.com/what-the-supreme-court-ruling-against-universal-injunctions-means-for-court-challenges-to-presidential-actions/

What the Supreme Court ruling against ‘universal injunctions’ means for court challenges to presidential actions

Via LLRX – What the Supreme Court ruling against ‘universal injunctions’ means for court challenges to presidential actions – When presidents have tried to make big changes through executive orders, they have often hit a roadblock: A single federal judge, whether located in Seattle or Miami or anywhere in between, could stop these policies across the entire country. But on June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court significantly limited this judicial power. In Trump v. CASA Inc., a 6-3 majority ruled that federal courts likely lack the authority to issue “universal injunctions” that block government policies nationwide. Professor Cassandra Burke Robertson explains how the ruling means that going forward federal judges can generally only block policies from being enforced against the specific plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit, not against everyone in the country.

Are we heading toward internal passports?

https://pogowasright.org/the-trump-administration-is-building-a-national-citizenship-data-system/

The Trump administration is building a national citizenship data system

Jude Joffe-Block and Miles Parks report:

The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.

The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.

NPR is the first news organization to report the details of the new system.

[…]

DHS, in partnership with the White House’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) team, has recently rolled out a series of upgrades to a network of federal databases to allow state and county election officials to quickly check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists — both U.S.-born and naturalized citizens — using data from the Social Security Administration as well as immigration databases.

Such integration has never existed before, and experts call it a sea change that inches the U.S. closer to having a roster of citizens — something the country has never embraced

Read more at NPR.

Related posts:

• Without Knowledge or Consent

• How Political Campaigns Use Your Phone’s Location to Target You

Pointing to future trends?

https://pogowasright.org/new-jersey-issues-draft-privacy-regulations-the-new/

New Jersey Issues Draft Privacy Regulations: The New

Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild writes:

New Jersey recently released draft privacy regulations, and there is a lot to unpack and process. In this three-part series, I will break down the regulations

Part 1: The New

Personal data:

• Scraping is carved out of “publicly available data” and constitutes personal data.

• Sale: Sharing with affiliates is not completely carved out. It doesn’t apply (i.e.. still a sale) if done to circumvent any obligations in the regs.

Scope of laws:

• Carve out of applicability (aka “nothing herein shall prevent controller…”): You are bound by all obligations if your internal research includes sharing identified data with a third party not for one of the reasons in the carve out. You must get affirmative consent if your internal research uses the data to train AI.

Violations:

• Under the regs, not providing a notice at or before the processing makes it a violation to collect the data (this is similar to the GDPR separate violations of Art 12-14 (need to provide notice) and the more serious Art 5 (violation of transparency).

Required (new) paperwork for showing data minimization to reflect:

• Necessity of the data for each purpose.

• Data inventory with type, where stored and who has access.

• Retention.

• Deletion and ensuring processor deletes.

• Assess whether biometric identifiers are necessary (once a year)

• Delete data after consent is revoked.

• Written information security plan

Read more of Part 1: The New at Privacy Compliance & Data Security.

How AI takes over the world?

https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis

People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"

As we reported earlier this month, many ChatGPT users are developing all-consuming obsessions with the chatbot, spiraling into severe mental health crises characterized by paranoia, delusions, and breaks with reality.

… Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis. He'd turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project; soon, after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats, he became engulfed in messianic delusions, proclaiming that he had somehow brought forth a sentient AI, and that with it he had "broken" math and physics, embarking on a grandiose mission to save the world. His gentle personality faded as his obsession deepened, and his behavior became so erratic that he was let go from his job. He stopped sleeping and rapidly lost weight.