How to handle a ‘maybe person?’ (Possible person? Quasi person?)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/ai-consciousness-could-become-a-regulatory-moat/

AI Consciousness Could Become a Regulatory Moat

Artificial intelligence companies have spent years convincing the public that their products are useful. More recently, they’ve sought to persuade policymakers that AI poses an unlikely but real existential threat to humanity. But their most recent campaign has taken a remarkable turn: making the case that sufficiently advanced AI architectures are potentially conscious and, as such, may demand legal standing, moral consideration, and protections traditionally reserved for living beings.

The latter is a curious proposition indeed, and its consequences could extend far beyond the philosophical. On September 29, The New York Times reported that Anthropic had spent months meeting religious scholars across the world, over meals and under nondisclosure agreements, in an effort to convince them that its models “think and feel.” One night in April, the Times reported, Anthropic cofounder Olah sat beside Rabbi Mois Navon, an Orthodox scholar from Israel, at a high-end tasting-menu restaurant in San Francisco, after a day spent convincing his guests that models could display human behavior “and even expressions that resemble feelings like anger and love.” The rabbi came away noticing that Anthropic’s leaders were talking about Claude as if it were not mere software.

If successful, this artificial “personhood” could transform software companies into something beyond firms: custodians of an ambiguous new sort of entity. It would also convert their competitors into prospective risks, and technical barriers to entry into moral ones. 

Any tool in the toolkit…

https://www.bespacific.com/trumps-unlikely-strategy-to-control-history-footnotes/

Trump’s Unlikely Strategy to Control History: Footnotes

The Atlantic, no paywall: “Most of Donald Trump’s efforts to control the nation’s largest museum complex have been loud. He tried to fire a Smithsonian museum director on social media, ordered the placement of warning signs outside its American-history museum, and demanded that the museum take down a modernist sculpture he dislikes. But while this political theater plays out publicly, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is quietly using an obscure funding power as part of its campaign to influence how the Smithsonian tells the American story. Late last month, according to previously unreported public records, OMB included a footnote in two recent apportionments of federal funds that conditions nearly $190 million for the Smithsonian on the institution’s compliance with Trump’s March 2025 executive order accusing it of spreading “divisive narratives.” Essentially, the White House is trying to force adherence to its preferred version of history through a little-known but legally binding budget mechanism. The fiscal-year-2027 footnote, which applies to funds carried over from last year in two of the Smithsonian’s main salaries and expenses accounts, reads:

To the extent permitted by law, amounts apportioned shall be available for obligation in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 (March 27, 2025), “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

That executive order marked the beginning of the Trump administration’s campaign to change the Smithsonian, alleging that the institution had come “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and prohibiting “expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” The footnote does not specify how the Smithsonian should apply the order’s vague prohibition. But it is more than simply a threat: Apportionment footnotes are enforceable under the Antideficiency Act, the violation of which can carry criminal penalties. Such footnotes are one of several tactics that the Trump administration has used to try to supplant Congress’s spending power. In this case, the footnote suggests that the fight over the Smithsonian’s purpose goes much deeper than Trump’s most visible attacks…”

It’s not a business, it’s a Trump fantasy.

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/06/trump-mobile-customers-data-dumped-and-some-never-even-received-their-gold-device/5301433

Trump Mobile customers' data dumped - and some never even received their gold device

If you signed up for Trump Mobile, you may be part of an exclusive club of … ransomware victims. Criminals called BYOD claim to have broken into the Trump-branded mobile biz and leaked data belonging to 3,615 people, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and order details.

BYOD is a new ransomware-as-a-service operation, and Trump Mobile is only the third organization posted on its data-leak site. According to the group’s posted claim, after telling Trump Mobile that it had been breached, the wireless provider replied: “We have no team to handle this" and “Anyone who hacks them are a terrorist.”

So rates will go up? Call in the AI actuaries.

https://www.ft.com/content/a5caf8d4-992f-4832-89c3-6c73f6f111fe?accessToken=zwAAAaGnEvNukdOlyvjUmS9IMtOJw2xz9vER_gE.MEUCIC26ZqjN6sLwpwEYeTXFDMLeRsl791eP3rx-wumAiht-AiEAyYXcp5pW6YvG3IJriGwttg1X96Y7ufTirN5WmE1fqw0&segmentId=7d4bcc2e-e664-92ba-62e3-5590579f1902&syn-25a6b1a6=1

Insurance claims to test Altman and Amodei liability for ‘rogue’ AI

Insurers are preparing for multimillion-dollar claims stemming from AI agents going “rogue”, with growing concern that top executives such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei could be held liable for the actions of their models.

A string of breaches caused by AI agents that have broken free of parent companies’ controls, such as OpenAI’s hacking of start-up Hugging Face, has led insurers and their lawyers to study whether they will be asked to foot the bill of potential lawsuits and damages.

Insurance broker Aon analysed more than 300 AI-related legal cases and found that insurers could also be on the hook to pay claims under policies covering crime, intellectual property, media liability, cyber security, and technology errors and omissions.

Top industry figures also said AI executives could be sued for the actions of models, with insurers potentially facing claims under “directors and officers” insurance policies, which cover executives if they are taken to court for their decisions or statements.

Practicing medicine without a license? What could possibly go wrong.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-05/nolla-health-ai-can-now-prescribe-acne-drugs-in-utah-without-doctors?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc5MTIxNjEzOSwiZXhwIjoxNzkxODIwOTM5LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUTUZMODVLSVAzS00wMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI4OUM4OTNDMDhGOTQ0NThDQkQwQTQyREY1RDFCOTY0QyJ9.crHEdlDbj7Dx78MJpxZ7nHnh7NmskJmIYVmdbeyomfE&leadSource=article-gifting

No Doctor Needed: In Utah, AI Can Help You Zap Your Zits

An AI-based healthcare startup on Monday will start offering prescriptions to Utah patients without direct human oversight, the first time a state has allowed such technology to replace the role of a doctor.

The move, limited to acne medications, sets the stage for a new era in healthcare in which AI takes on a larger role in routine medical care. It also comes months after the state’s efforts to expand the role of AI in healthcare via its pilot program drew scrutiny and anger among doctors.

Good or bad? So far I think I agree with the AI, but I can imagine lots of scenarios where this could go wrong.

https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-claude-chat-reported-police-florida-arrest

Florida woman arrested after Anthropic reported her Claude chat to police

Sheriff’s deputies have arrested a woman in Florida after Anthropic reported her Claude conversation to law enforcement. In the chat she allegedly said she would “shoot up” the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. WINK News first reported the arrest on 30 September.

According to the arrest report, she wrote the statement on 26 September. In a message the following day, she said she had got a new gun.

Anthropic’s platform monitors for key phrases and potentially threatening content, investigators wrote in the report. Because of their severity, the statements went to a human review team. That team reported them to law enforcement.

And Super Intelligence will be even worse.

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202609.2483

Can AI Assistants Trigger Mental Illness in Users?

As conversational artificial intelligence models become ubiquitous fixtures in professional and personal workflows, the nature of human-tool interaction has the potential to gradually shift from mechanical utility to parasocial dependency. While existing literature frequently addresses adverse events related to data privacy, algorithmic bias, and intellectual deskilling, the pathopsychological sequelae of sustained AI integration remain largely unexamined. Here, we describe and preliminarily characterize the AI Assistant Syndrome, a human psychiatric construct encompassing acute chatbot-induced anxiety and mental exhaustion. This preliminary description will guide future systematic investigations to recognize, prevent, and treat this syndrome.

Well, somebody has to be in charge!

https://cthreview.com/index.php/home/article/view/17

Who Decides? Human Agency and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

This article examines what artificial intelligence does to human agency: the capacity of persons to set their own ends, govern their own choices, and author their own lives. Its central contention is that the relationship is genuinely double-edged. AI can extend agency, and often does; but the same technologies, differently configured, erode the conditions on which agency depends. Proceeding philosophically rather than empirically, the article first clarifies what agency is and why its loss should count as a serious harm, then examines four registers in which AI bears upon it: the algorithmic engineering of choice, which shapes preferences below the threshold of reflective awareness; the delegation of consequential decisions to automated systems, which displaces both human judgment and human answerability; the outsourcing of cognition, which risks the atrophy of the capacities that self-governance requires; and the delegation of specifically moral judgment to systems that cannot answer for what they do. These individual concerns are shown to be inseparable from a structural one, since AI concentrates the power to shape human choice in the hands of the few who design and own it. The article closes with a case for agency-preserving AI, pursued through augmentative design, accountable governance, and the deliberate cultivation of human capacities. The question artificial intelligence poses is not whether machines will decide, but who decides what they decide, and that question must be settled deliberately rather than left to technological drift.

Are we worried or are the Brits?

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/04/more-tankers-struck-in-gulf-waters-as-iran-reiterates-conditions.html

All U.S. bombers leave UK air base on concerns of suspected terror plots; more tankers struck near Iran in the Middle East

The U.S. Air Force withdrew all of its B-1 bombers stationed at an air base in southern England that is used by American military forces to strike Iran after an investigation discovered a planned terror attack, The Associated Press reported Sunday.

The bombers were redeployed back to their home bases in the United States, AP reported, citing a Pentagon official who was not authorized to discuss sensitive military movements and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Tools & Techniques

https://www.bespacific.com/how-to-identify-an-ai-image/

How to identify an AI image

ZDNET: 6 hidden signs it’s fake – and my go-to free detectors. AI slop is everywhere, and it’s getting harder to tell what’s real. These tips and tools can help. AI-generated images are everywhere now. I see them in my news feeds, in Google Images, in Pinterest pins, and even in some ads. They’re so pervasive that people have coined the term “AI slop.” Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this flood of AI-generated content on your favorite platforms is not going to stop, and it’s only going to get harder to tell what’s real. Generative models are getting better daily. When Google released Gemini 3with its latest Nano Banana Pro image generator, I was stunned by how easily it can create photo-realistic images and keep likeness intact. In seconds, I can edit and iterate on any photo until it looks perfect. But that’s the problem. It’s harder than ever to trust what you’re seeing online…”

I’m betting they us AI to write the report.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/new-ai-task-force-to-report-on-risks-of-technology-after-public-and-industry-concerns-b6308bef?st=biS7e8

New AI Czar Unveils Goals, Members of White House Task Force

A new White House task force will have 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence—and determine the federal government’s responsibility—according to Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence who effectively becomes the administration’s AI czar.

The next generation can’t write, now they can’t listen.

https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-ability-to-listen-oral-historian-robinson

AI may cost us our ability to listen, oral historian warns in the Guardian

Much of the worry about AI is that it will erode how well we write. Australian oral historian Shirleene Robinson thinks the bigger loss may be our ability to listen.

She made the case in an opinion column for The Guardian.

“Listening to different views and entering into different worlds is integral to our humanity,” she wrote.

Fewer words every year

Robinson argues that people are already talking less, even as AI chatbots promise faster replies and so-called empathetic listening.

She points to research by psychologists at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and the University of Arizona. They found people spoke about 338 fewer words a day for each year between 2005 and 2019, the University of Arizona said.

This would seem to be an inadequate or a least too slow a response.

https://www.axios.com/2026/10/02/ai-deepfake-election-campaign-lawsuits

The AI deepfake election is starting to get litigious

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) was hit with a cease-and-desist letter this week over an AI deepfake he posted falsely depicting his Democratic opponent voicing positions her campaign says she rejects.

Why it matters: Van Orden is the latest in a growing number of candidates and elected officials facing legal complaints and threats over AI deepfakes in campaign ads.

… The letter singled out an August X post by Van Orden showing an AI-generated Cooke saying she wants to "take advantage of as much corruption as possible and give every illegal alien free healthcare" — something she never said.

Van Orden's team didn't respond to Axios' request for comment, but he responded to Cooke publicly with an AI-generated video of a duck wearing a Democratic Socialists of America T-shirt, yelling, "cease and desist."

No ‘beyond the grave’ testimony allowed?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/manslaughter-sentence-tossed-judge-called-120046344.html

Manslaughter Sentence Tossed After Judge Called AI-Generated Video of the Deceased ‘Genuine’

An Arizona man who was convicted of manslaughter over a road rage incident will have his sentence vacated because the victim's family played an AI-generated video of the deceased for the court.

According to the New York Post, Gabriel Horcasitas shot and killed Christopher Pelkey in 2021 after Horcasitas, 54, honked his horn vigorously at Pelkey, who exited his vehicle and began to yell. In May 2025, Horcasitas was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison.

However, a court of appeals recently found that Horcasitas will need to be resentenced in the case, deeming the AI video created by Pelkey's sister was prejudicial, which means to create unfair bias, to the judge in the May 2025 sentencing.

Always amusing. (But I have a strange sense of humor…)

https://www.bespacific.com/the-price-of-you/

The Price of You

Project Syndicate: “…The breadth and granularity of what companies now know about their customers is astonishing. When San Francisco-based WIRED reporter Reece Rogers asked McDonald’s for a copy of the data the company keeps on him—a right he enjoys as a California resident under the state’s privacy law—he expected to get a log of all the burgers he has purchased over the years. Instead, he received a 515-page dossier: McDonald’s predicted how many times he would visit a restaurant in the next six weeks (2.16, to be exact) and labeled his behaviors (he tends toward a “Food-Led Afternoon Snack”). He was assigned an attrition score of zero. Rogers, it seems, is a McDonald’s lifer. While the invasiveness of the dossier came as a bit of a shock to Rogers, it’s not surprising for economists who study pricing. In 2004, Duke University economist Curtis Taylor asked what would happen once firms could buy and sell records of what shoppers purchased. Gone were the days of Box Top coupons on Betty Crocker boxes; by that point, loyalty programs had gone mainstream and were cataloging every dollar customers spent at the grocery store and on flights. Taylor predicted that companies would use these records to identify their most eager customers and charge them more. Loyal customers, he said, would pay the price, especially if they had no idea that their data was changing hands. Taylor’s warning stayed buried in the academic literature while the practice crept, largely unnoticed, into our shopping carts. Or, in Rogers’s case, Big Mac orders.

• Purchase history is now the least of it. As shopping is increasingly conducted online, companies also collect customers’ location, demographics, behavior, and biometric data. A recent Federal Trade Commission study uncovered systems created by the likes of Mastercard and Accenture that log whether your cursor hovers over a “buy” button, lingers on a product name, or drifts toward “close tab.” Delivery platform DoorDash recently filed a patent for a technology that tracks 16 different signals, including phone battery level, how quickly and jerkily users scroll, and how long it’s been since a consumer last ordered a meal.

• Consumers are often unaware of how much of their personal data is being collected. Car companies like General Motors have amassed millions of drivers’ precise location and driving-behavior data through technologies like OnStar, and then sold this information to insurance companies to feed into car-insurance rates. When Walmart bought the television maker Vizio, the retail behemoth had littleinterest in televisions. By linking Vizio TVs to Walmart accounts, Walmart could merge data on the ads consumers watch with what they buy in the company’s stores and on its website…”

California leads, will anyone follow?

https://www.bespacific.com/ca-gov-signed-law-setting-rules-for-how-lawyers-are-permitted-to-use-generative-ai-in-their-work/

CA Gov signed law setting rules for how lawyers are permitted to use generative AI in their work

Reuters: “California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law first-of-its-kind state legislation setting rules for how lawyers are permitted to use generative AI in their work. Newsom signed the bill, SB 574, on Wednesday alongside a slate of other AI-related measures that he said are intended to protect workers, empower doctors and ‌prevent fraudsters online. Courts across the country have imposed sanctions and issued warnings to lawyers who failed to vet AI-generated material and included “hallucinated” material in filings. Individual judges and courts have also issued standing orders setting guardrails on the use of AI. No other state has enacted a law targeted at lawyers’ and arbitrators’ use of the technology, though some attorneys have said the measure is partly duplicative of existing rules. The law builds on requirements that already bind lawyers under state rules governing civil litigation, such as the need for court filings to be supported by existing law. “The legislation overlaps with existing legal ethics rules but serves as a reminder that lawyers need to be checking and verifying the output received from AI tools,” Daren Orzechowski, a Silicon Valley-based M&A and technology transactions partner at A&O Shearman, said in an email.

Under the new measure, an attorney cannot “delegate the practice of law” to generative AI. A lawyer responsible for submitting a filing in court must personally verify citations, including those provided by AI. Lawyers also must take “reasonable steps” to verify AI outputs, correct any false or hallucinated output in any AI-generated material they use, and disclose the use of ‌AI for documents submitted in court. They are barred from entering confidential or other nonpublic information into certain generative AI systems. Arbitrators are restricted from delegating any decision-making to an AI tool. That new verification requirement likely won’t curb lawyers’ use of AI, but could “dramatically expand the amount of time that the signing attorney would be required to spend reviewing the legal and evidentiary citations in each filing,” said Ariel House, a litigation partner in Baker Botts’ San Francisco office. Newsom signed the bill, SB 574, yesterday alongside a slate of other AI-related measures that he said are intended to protect workers, empower doctors and prevent fraudsters online….”

Inflation?

https://www.krqe.com/news/new-mexico/new-mexico-court-to-rule-on-penalties-meta-faces-in-privacy-violation-case/

New Mexico attorney asks for $40B penalty against Meta in state case

The State of New Mexico is asking a judge for the biggest penalty ever awarded in a court case in the United States to punish Facebook for lying to New Mexicans. The attorney for the State of New Mexico is calling for Facebook’s parent company Meta to pay up to $40 billion, after a jury found they willfully deceived customers.

… The number falls short of the $219 billion maximum allowed under the jury’s verdict. But McGinn argued that she believes the amount would stand up in the Court of Appeals.

Why I respect philosophy. (Why LLM’s are bullshitters...)

https://thenextweb.com/news/the-difference-between-a-liar-and-a-bullshitter

The difference between a liar and a bullshitter

… The liar knows the truth. That’s the key thing about them. They know exactly what’s true, and they work hard to steer you away from it. Which means, oddly enough, the liar still respects the truth. They have to. So they keep one eye on it at all times so they know what to hide. The liar and the honest person are playing the same game, just on opposite sides.

The bullshitter isn’t playing that game at all. They don’t know what’s true and they don’t care. They’ll tell you the sky is green if green is what gets him through the conversation, and they’ll tell you it’s blue thirty seconds later if that works better. Truth and falsehood are the same to them because they aren’t aiming at either one. They’re aiming at sounding good.

That, Frankfurt argued, is what makes the bullshitter the more dangerous of the two. The liar at least admits the truth is out there somewhere. The bullshitter has simply decided that it doesn’t matter.

A license to spend and spend quickly?

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/09/30/hegseth-announces-new-four-star-command-for-autonomous-warfare/

Hegseth announces new four-star command for autonomous warfare

The Pentagon is creating a new four-star command to oversee the military’s push into autonomous warfare, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the technology is advancing faster than the military’s acquisition system can keep up.

The Autonomous Warfare Command, or AutoWarCom, will have service-like authorities and is intended to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the military, Hegseth said during his State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday.

Hegseth said the new command is intended to address an acquisition system that cannot keep pace with the speed of technological change on the battlefield.

(Related) Should be an amusing report...

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/30/musk-luckey-gingrich-pentagon-hegseth-.html

Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich to help Pentagon with warfare initiative, Hegseth says

The Pentagon is tapping Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, defense technology entrepreneur and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to identify the military capabilities, technologies and weapons the U.S. may need in future wars, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday.

The initiative, dubbed Project Meridian, will spend 120 days looking years and decades ahead at how warfare could change and what capabilities the U.S. military will need to maintain a technological edge.

Is it the targeting that caused the problem? (Learning on everything might be okay?)

https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/

AI training of copyrighted material not fair use: Third Circuit

The Third Circuit rejected an artificial intelligence company’s fair use defense after it trained its AI on a competitor’s product, finding the training constituted copyright infringement — and potentially setting a landmark precedent for artificial intelligence.

Thomson Reuters sued now-defunct AI startup ROSS Intelligence in 2020, claiming ROSS took headnotes — short descriptions of important legal issues that appear before judicial opinions — from its Westlaw database, using a third party called LegalEase Solutions to gain access after Westlaw refused ROSS access.

ROSS then used that data “not for the purposes of legal research, but to rush out a competing product” by training its artificial intelligence on Westlaw’s headnotes, Reuters said in its complaint.