Perspective.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/30/mary-meeker-trends-report-openai

Q&A with Mary Meeker on the AI revolution

Mary Meeker, the famed internet analyst turned venture capitalist, on Friday published her first Trends report since 2019 — focused on the AI revolution.

Silicon Valley execs and investors are sure to pour over all 340 pages, but Axios chatted with Meeker this morning to distill some top takeaways.

Perhaps DOGE fired all the proofreaders?

https://retractionwatch.com/2025/05/31/weekend-reads-maha-report-cites-nonexistent-studies-rfk-jr-threatens-publishing-access-can-zombie-papers-be-killed/

Weekend reads: MAHA report cites nonexistent studies; RFK Jr. threatens publishing access; can ‘zombie papers’ be killed?

Perspective.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/31/world/asia/north-korea-russia-weapons.html

North Korea Gets a Weapons Bonanza From Russia

Kim Jong-un seized on Russia’s need for support in its war against Ukraine. His reward is a rapidly modernizing military that threatens the delicate balance of power on the Korean Peninsula.

Interesting how many ways Trump attracts lawsuits.

https://www.bespacific.com/judge-chutkan-lets-case-against-trumps-shadow-government-proceed/

Judge Chutkan Lets Case Against Trump’s Shadow Government Proceed

LegalAF By Michael Popok: “A blockbuster ruling out of federal court just put the brakes on Donald Trump’s alleged attempt to bypass Congress and install a shadow government headed—at least in part—by none other than Elon Musk.  Federal District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has ruled that a lawsuit brought by 14 states challenging the legality of Trump’s so-called “Doge” agency will not be dismissed. The lawsuit alleges that Elon Musk—through his de facto control of the Doge agency—has been exercising power over at least 17 federal departments and agencies, wielding sweeping executive authority without Senate confirmation, without proper legal appointment, and in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution. Judge Chutkan, in a 50-page ruling, said the plaintiffs had alleged a valid injury and sufficiently stated a claim that must now proceed to the next stages of litigation, including discovery. In denying the motion to dismiss, she rejected arguments that Musk is some sort of “temporary special government worker”—a kind of Uber-style advisor with no real power. In her words, he “wields considerable power,” and the allegations that Trump effectively created an unauthorized agency with Musk at the helm were more than enough to get past this early hurdle… A Separation of Powers Crisis – The central constitutional issue raised by the 14-state coalition is that Trump—via executive order—illegally created a federal agency and appointed Musk (and possibly others) to lead it, bypassing both Congressional authorization and Senate confirmation. Judge Chutkan made clear: only Congress has the power to create federal agencies. The president may nominate individuals to lead those agencies, but only with Senate confirmation.

In her opinion, Chutkan wrote: “The Constitution divides and balances power across the three branches—the Executive, Legislature, and Judiciary—as a vital check against tyranny and to promote effective governance.” She zeroed in on the “Appointments Clause” of the Constitution, which embodies this principle of separated powers. It prevents a president from unilaterally creating new offices and staffing them with loyalists—precisely the concern voiced by the Framers in their efforts to prevent the rise of tyranny.

Finally, a grasp of the obvious!

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/29/china_preparing_war_mcmaster/

Why is China deep in US networks? 'They're preparing for war,' HR McMaster tells lawmakers

Chinese government spies burrowed deep into American telecommunications systems and critical infrastructure networks for one reason, according to retired US Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

"Why is China on our systems? Because I think they're preparing for war," McMaster told lawmakers during the US House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security field hearing.

Perspective.

https://www.bespacific.com/the-new-dark-age-the-trump-administration-has-launched-an-attack-on-knowledge-itself/

The New Dark Age – The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself

The Atlantic no paywall: “The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall. Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical. These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault.

The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power…”

Perspective.

https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/press-release/mass-facial-recognition-roll-out-exists-in-legal-grey-area/

Mass facial recognition roll-out exists in ‘legal grey area’ due to inadequate governance, says the Ada Lovelace Institute

• The use of biometric surveillance technologies is rapidly expanding across the public and private sector – including in shops, train stations and schools.

• But there is no specific legal basis for their use, and the UK’s fragmented governance framework is failing in practice, creating legal uncertainty and undermining public trust.

• New, risk-based legislation is urgently needed to establish clear rules alongside an independent regulator to enforce them.

How could you not expect a strong reaction?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-court-blocks-trumps-liberation-day-tariffs-2025-05-28/

US court blocks most Trump tariffs, says president exceeded his authority

… "The court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President's use of tariffs as leverage," a three-judge panel said in the decision to issue a permanent injunction on the blanket tariff orders issued by Trump since January. "That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because [federal law] does not allow it."

… The judges also ordered the Trump administration to issue new orders reflecting the permanent injunction within 10 days. The Trump administration minutes later filed a notice of appeal and questioned the authority of the court.

Will this escalate?

https://www.bespacific.com/judge-strikes-down-another-big-law-eo/

Judge Strikes Down Another Big Law EO

TMP: “U.S. District Judge John Bates of Washington, D.C. just awarded summary judgment to Jenner & Block, finding President Trump’s executive order against it unlawful and declaring it null and void. This is remarkably strong language from a George W. Bush appointee who served on Special Counsel Ken Starr’s team:

This case arises from one of a series of executive orders targeting law firms that, in one way or another, did not bow to the current presidential administration’s political orthodoxy. Like the others in the series, this order—which takes aim at the global law firm Jenner & Block—makes no bones about why it chose its target: it picked Jenner because of the causes Jenner champions, the clients Jenner represents, and a lawyer Jenner once employed. Going after law firms in this way is doubly violative of the Constitution. Most obviously, retaliating against firms for the views embodied in their legal work—and thereby seeking to muzzle them going forward—violates the First Amendment’s central command that government may not “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.” More subtle but perhaps more pernicious is the message the order sends to the lawyers whose unalloyed advocacy protects against governmental viewpoint becoming government-imposed orthodoxy. This order, like the others, seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers. It thus violates the Constitution and the Court will enjoin its operation in full.”

Are we getting something wrong?

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/video/nobel-laureate-busts-the-ai-hype/

Nobel Laureate Busts the AI Hype

Many analysts predict that AI will transform the global economy, but MIT economist Daron Acemoglu offers a contrasting view. In this brief video, he explains why AI might automate only 5% of tasks and add just 1% to global GDP over the next decade, and he shares his perspective on how business leaders should approach AI investments.

What is compliance worth?

https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/27/apple-dma-30-days-deadline/

EU ruling: Apple’s App Store still in violation of DMA, 30 days to comply

The European Commission has officially published its full ruling against Apple’s App Store practices in the European Union, and the message is clear: the company’s new “DMA-compliant” terms… still aren’t compliant.

A good start, but far from perfect.

https://www.bespacific.com/how-to-disappear/

How to Disappear

The Atlantic [no paywall] “Inside the world of extreme-privacy consultants, who, for the right fee, will make you and your personal information very hard to find. You could easily mistake Alec Harris for a spy or an escaped prisoner, given all of the tradecraft he devotes to being unfindable. Mail addressed to him goes to a UPS Store. To buy things online, he uses a YubiKey, a small piece of hardware resembling a thumb drive, to open Bitwarden, a password manager that stores his hundreds of unique, long, random passwords. Then he logs in to Privacy.com, a subscription service that lets him open virtual debit cards under as many different names as he wishes; Harris has 191 cards at this point, each specific to a single vendor but all linked to the same bank account. This isolates risk: If any vendor is breached, whatever information it has about him won’t be exploitable anywhere else…

Harris is the CEO of HavenX, a firm that provides its clients with extreme privacy and security services. It was spun off from Halo, which focuses on government clients, in 2023. HavenX customers, some of whom pay tens of thousands of dollars a month, typically face serious threats. Some are celebrities or ultra-wealthy families. Others are business executives—interest from this group has risen since the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year. The recent Signal leak, too, in which the editor in chief of this magazine was erroneously added to a high-level Trump administration group chat, triggered more than a few corner-office freak-outs. Many HavenX clients come from the cryptocurrency world: Some made a fast fortune and, because they can’t park their crypto in a bank, are unusually vulnerable; some run crypto companies and are seen, accurately or not, as controlling access to other people’s digital wealth. The recent crypto-market boom has brought a wave of kidnappings, in which some crypto owners have even been held for ransom or tortured into surrendering the keys to their coins. Harris said the first quarter of this year was HavenX’s busiest since the spin-off…”

Did I miss this earlier?

https://www.insideprivacy.com/artificial-intelligence/european-commission-publishes-qa-on-ai-literacy/

European Commission Publishes Q&A on AI Literacy

On May 7, 2025, the European Commission published a Q&A on the AI literacy obligation under Article 4 of the AI Act (the “Q&A”).  The Q&A builds upon the Commission’s guidance on AI literacy provided in its webinar in February 2025, covered in our earlier blog here.  Among other things, the Commission clarifies that the AI literacy obligation started to apply from February 2, 2025, but that the national market surveillance authorities tasked with supervising and enforcing the obligation will start doing so from August 3, 2026 onwards.

I thought there was an easy way to check bogus citations. Was I wrong?

https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/ai-hallucination-cases/

AI Hallucination Cases (via) Damien Charlotin maintains this database of cases around the world where a legal decision has been made that confirms hallucinated content from generative AI was presented by a lawyer.

That's an important distinction: this isn't just cases where AI may have been used, it's cases where a lawyer was caught in the act and (usually) disciplined for it.

It's been two years since the first widely publicized incident of this, which I wrote about at the time in Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused. At the time I naively assumed:

I have a suspicion that this particular story is going to spread far and wide, and in doing so will hopefully inoculate a lot of lawyers and other professionals against making similar mistakes.

Damien's database has 116 cases from 12 different countries: United States, Israel, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, Trinidad & Tobago.

20 of those cases happened just this month, May 2025!

I get the impression that researching legal precedent is one of the most time-consuming parts of the job. I guess it's not surprising that increasing numbers of lawyers are returning to LLMs for this, even in the face of this mountain of cautionary stories.

A detour in the debate? (If you can’t define ‘person’ perhaps you can define ‘nonperson.)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5263669

Legislating Nonpersonhood

Recently, two state legislatures – Idaho’s and Utah’s – passed statutes that preclude courts, agencies, and lawmakers from recognizing the legal personhood of nonhuman animals, nature, artificial intelligence, and inanimate objects. These “nonpersonhood statutes” are responses to social, political, and legal efforts to expand the concept of personhood to recognize the rights of nature, animals, and sentient artificial consciousnesses, as well as the duties of artificially intelligent machines. As social movements continue to advocate for more robust moral and legal status for various nonhuman entities, this kind of legislative backlash is virtually inevitable. Idaho and Utah’s nonpersonhood statutes are thus harbingers of legislative debates to come.

This Article evaluates the nonpersonhood statutes against the backdrop of jurisprudential theories of legal personhood. It describes the social context in which these laws have arisen and critically interrogates the rationales and discursive practices of the laws’ sponsors and proponents. It argues that the nonpersonhood statutes conflict with leading jurisprudential theories of personhood, illustrating the malleability and indeterminacy of the “legal person.” The nonpersonhood statutes show how personhood is a vehicle for social, political, and axiological beliefs about who should – and should not – matter before the law. The nonpersonhood statutes demonstrate the ways in which the concept of the human person is defined in contradistinction to its Others: the animal, the natural, the artificial, and the material. This kind of abjection justifies the relegation of nonhuman others to the status of nonpersons, which in turn justifies and enables acts of violence, especially against animals and nature.

This Article’s analysis of the nonpersonhood statutes makes several novel contributions to the literature on personhood, ecology, animal rights, and artificial intelligence. First, it collects and describes the legislative histories of these first-of-their-kind laws. Second, it analyzes the discourse of personhood in the context of legislators, who are an underexplored source for theorizing personhood compared to existing scholarship, which has focused on the opinions of judges and the theories of scholars. Third, it explores the gap between jurisprudential theories and legislative practice, illustrating the indeterminate and political nature of complex legal concepts such as “personhood.” Ultimately, it critiques these laws as impediments to the much-needed process of rethinking the human person and its relations to the rest of existence.

Could be useful…

https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/journal-of-property-law/vol11/iss4/1/

Foreword: The ‘Why’ & How’ of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Scholarship

In the course of publishing the 2024–25 Volume of the Texas A&M Journal of Property Law, we, the Editorial Board, were presented with the opportunity to publish a collection of articles drafted explicitly with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”). After some consideration, we made the decision to do so. The following is our endeavor to share with our peers and colleagues—who may soon find themselves in similar situations—what we have learned in this process and, separately, contribute some forward-looking standards that can be implemented in the arena of legal scholarship for the transparent signaling and taxonomizing of AI-assisted works.

Replacing lawyers?

https://www.bespacific.com/from-hype-to-habits-comparing-data-on-generative-ai-in-law-firms/

From Hype to Habits: Comparing Data on Generative AI in Law Firms

Via LLRX – From Hype to Habits: Comparing Data on Generative AI in Law Firms – Since generative AI was first publicly released over two years ago, a litany of reports has been released that provide insight into how law firms are approaching it and the changing perspectives on its benefits and risks.  Nicole L. Black brings the facts to the discussion of how and to what extent law firms are actually implementing AI.

Again, AI is not people?

https://apnews.com/article/ai-lawsuit-suicide-artificial-intelligence-free-speech-ccc77a5ff5a84bda753d2b044c83d4b6

In lawsuit over teen’s death, judge rejects arguments that AI chatbots have free speech rights

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected arguments made by an artificial intelligence  company that its chatbots are protected by the First Amendment — at least for now. The developers behind Character.AI are seeking to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the company’s chatbots pushed a teenage boy to kill himself.

The judge’s order will allow the wrongful death lawsuit to proceed, in what legal experts say is among the latest constitutional tests of artificial intelligence.

If not an act of war, at least a new branch of the military. This is not a couple of kids working in their basement.

https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/russia-hacking-ukraine-aid-logistics-tech-companies-advisory/748723/

Russia stepping up attacks on firms aiding Ukraine, Western nations warn

As Russian missiles have rained down on Ukraine, Moscow’s hackers have increased their efforts to sabotage Western companies providing support to Kyiv.

The state-linked cyber team known as Fancy Bear has “expanded its targeting of logistics entities and technology companies involved in the delivery of aid, the U.S. and 10 of its closest allies said in a cyber threat advisory published Wednesday.

Russian hackers have targeted defense contractors, transportation facilities, maritime operators, air traffic control systems and IT service providers, according to the advisory. Their techniques are a mixture of brute-force password cracking, spear-phishing to obtain credentials and deliver malware and the exploitation of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Outlook and other software programs.

Do we have a consensus on problems?

https://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-gdpr-technology-rewrites-prized-loathed-privacy-law/

GDPR is cracking: Brussels rewrites its prized privacy law

… The EU executive on Wednesday will present its plan to amend the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR for short, to ease reporting requirements for small and cash-strapped businesses. That same evening, EU officials are negotiating the final details of a separate law that's meant to fix some of what's seen as the GDPR's original design flaws.

(Related)

https://cdt.org/insights/cdt-europe-joins-an-open-letter-against-the-reopening-of-gdpr/

CDT Europe Joins an Open Letter Against the Reopening of GDPR

A broad coalition of 108 civil society organisations, academics, companies, trade unions, and experts, including CDT Europe, have published an open letter addressed to the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President Virkkunen, and Commissioner McGrath, to express their grave concerns regarding the ongoing proposals to reopen the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the backbone of the EU’s digital rulebook, and a hard-fought legislative achievement that sets high standards and safeguards people’s dignity in a data-driven world.

How? Is it that hard to check the output of AI?

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405022/fake-summer-reading-list-ai

How an AI-generated summer reading list got published in major newspapers

Some newspapers around the country, including the Chicago Sun-Times and at least one edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer have published a syndicated summer book list that includes made-up books by famous authors.

Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende never wrote a book called Tidewater Dreams, described in the "Summer reading list for 2025" as the author's "first climate fiction novel."

Percival Everett, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, never wrote a book called The Rainmakers, supposedly set in a "near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity."

Only five of the 15 titles on the list are real.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.bespacific.com/solo-attorney-compared-current-lexis-subscription-to-chatgpt-deep-research/

Solo attorney compared current LEXIS subscription to ChatGPT Deep Research

Via LinkedIn – Carolyn Elefant – “I just compared my current LEXIS subscription to ChatGPT Deep Research and was blown away. My takeaways:

✅ ChatGPTDeepResearch – Comprehensive, well-organized memo.
❌ LEXIS – A big, over-inclusive data dump

❎ ChatGPTDeepResearch – Identified key SCOTUS precedent in first sentence.
❌ LEXIS – Missed precedent entirely.

✅ ChatGPTDeepResearch – Seamlessly accessible via browser
❌ LEXIS – Layers of paywall and log-in hell.

✅ ChatGPTDeepResearch: Part of my $200/month enterprise subscription with all other features but can be accessed as part of $20/month subscription.
❌ LEXIS – $270/month subscription that LEXIS has yet to update to include all AI features like every other tech product.

Why law school professors aren’t putting out these kinds of demos daily is a mystery – or perhaps the schools’ contracts with the WEXIS duopoly bar public criticism.  To view my longer blog post visit here and to see video documentation, visit this link.”

Tools & Techniques. (Anything on fact checking?)

https://www.bespacific.com/getting-the-most-from-ai-tools-a-practical-guide-to-writing-effective-prompts/

Getting the Most from AI Tools: A Practical Guide to Writing Effective Prompts

Lande, John, Getting the Most from AI Tools: A Practical Guide to Writing Effective Prompts (May 14, 2025). University of Missouri School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2025-24, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5254164 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5254164

“This article is a companion to How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bot: What I Learned About AI and What You Can Too. This article helps users, especially those in dispute resolution roles, learn how to write effective prompts and engage productively with artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The goal is to make AI less intimidating and more useful – one good question at a time. The article shows how users can choose appropriate tools, formulate effective prompts, and generate useful results.  It offers role-specific prompt suggestions for mediators, attorneys, disputants, ADR program managers, law school faculty, students, and scholars. These examples are designed to support clear communication, creative problem-solving, intentional practice, and continuous learning. Though focused on the Real Practice Systems Coach tool, most suggestions can be used with other AI platforms.”

Still covered by attorney-client relationship?

https://www.bespacific.com/heads-up-for-lawyers-who-use-chatgpt-outside-firm-approved-systems/

Heads-up for lawyers who use ChatGPT outside firm-approved systems

Via Ray Lament, LinkedIn [click graphic to enlarge]

“On 13 May 2025 the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered OpenAI to preserve and segregate every chat record that would normally be deleted. The directive stands until the court decides otherwise. Surveys show plenty of practitioners have preferred the public version of ChatGPT to enterprise legal-AI tools, counting on auto-deletion to keep the risk down. This ruling shows a court can tell an AI provider to keep data you assumed had vanished, even if the order is later narrowed or overturned…”

Interesting that the obvious controls must be missing. This driver had too much access...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/doordash-hack.html

DoorDash Hack

A DoorDash driver stole over $2.5 million over several months:

The driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, placed expensive orders from a fraudulent customer account in the DoorDash app. Then, using DoorDash employee credentials, he manually assigned the orders to driver accounts he and the others involved had created. Devagiri would then mark the undelivered orders as complete and prompt DoorDash’s system to pay the driver accounts. Then he’d switch those same orders back to “in process” and do it all over again. Doing this “took less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders,” writes the US Attorney’s Office.

Interesting flaw in the software design. He probably would have gotten away with it if he’d kept the numbers small. It’s only when the amount missing is too big to ignore that the investigations start.

New types of wealth attract old types of crime.

https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-05-16/kidnappings-torture-and-severed-fingers-attacks-on-crypto-entrepreneurs-shake-france.html

Kidnappings, torture, and severed fingers: Attacks on crypto entrepreneurs shake France

At 8:20 a.m. on May 13, just as parents were accompanying their children to school in the wealthy 11th arrondissement of Paris, three hooded, armed men got out of a white delivery van and tried to kidnap a woman walking down the street with her two-year-old son. The father threw himself to the ground between them and received several blows to the head before a neighbor armed with a fire extinguisher appeared on the scene. Blindsided, the kidnappers took off in their van, abandoning one of the weapons on the sidewalk.

The woman is the daughter of Pierre Noizat, owner of the Paymium platform and a cryptocurrency pioneer. This is a sector being targeted by organized crime in France and this case is not atypical. The country has been experiencing a wave of kidnappings with extreme violence against cryptocurrency investors and their families for months. The advantages of this type of currency in the market is its speed and anonymity while the fact it is untraceable makes it attractive to organized crime operators, who see it as the perfect currency for ransoms and extortion. France has declared a full-scale war against organized crime, which in recent years has defied the state and even attacked prisons, protesting the reforms planned by the Ministry of the Interior to deal with mafias that operate from inside.

The porn industry has always been an early adapter. What can we learn?

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dinesh-Deckker/publication/391576123_Artificial_Intelligence_and_Pornography_A_Comprehensive_Research_Review/links/681d76c0bfbe974b23c4f913/Artificial-Intelligence-and-Pornography-A-Comprehensive-Research-Review.pdf

Artificial Intelligence and pornography: A comprehensive research review

This comprehensive review examines the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and pornography, analyzing how AIdriven technologies such as deepfakes, recommendation systems, and content moderation tools are reshaping the adult entertainment industry. While AI introduces efficiencies in content creation and personalization, it also generates significant ethical, psychological, legal, and societal challenges. The proliferation of non-consensual deepfake pornography raises urgent concerns about consent, privacy, and image-based sexual abuse. AI's role in influencing user behaviour, reinforcing unrealistic sexual norms, and altering perceptions of intimacy is explored through psychological and media effects theories. Additionally, the paper highlights gaps in global regulation, inconsistencies in legal enforcement, and the urgent need for longitudinal and intervention studies to assess the real-world impacts of AIenhanced pornography. Future directions emphasise the development of ethical frameworks, robust technological safeguards, and interdisciplinary research to guide responsible innovation and protect human dignity in digital environments.

Another stab at privacy…

https://pogowasright.org/massachusetts-senate-committee-approves-robust-comprehensive-privacy-law/

Massachusetts Senate Committee Approves Robust Comprehensive Privacy Law

Seen at EPIC.org:

The Senate members of the Joint Committee on Advanced IT, Cybsecurity, and the Internet have given a favorable report to a redrafted version of the Massachusetts Data Privacy Act (“MDPA”). If enacted, MDPA would be the strongest state privacy law in the nation.

The Senate Committee bill, S.2516, uses many provisions from EPIC and Consumer Reports’ model state privacy bill. It builds on existing state laws and includes data minimization provisions that meaningfully limit the collection and use of personal data. The legislation also bans the sale of sensitive data such as precise geolocation data, data about minors, and health data. MDPA also includes strong enforcement mechanisms, including a private right of action, allowing consumers to hold companies accountable for violations of the law and encouraging compliance.

MDPA also includes a data broker registry, a one-stop mechanism for Massachsuetts residents to delete their data held by data brokers, and the Location Shield Act, which would give heightened protections to precise geolocation information.

“EPIC commends Senator Michael Moore and the Senate members of the Committee for advancing a bill that, if enacted, would provide Massachusetts residents with the privacy protections they need to stay safe online,” said EPIC Deputy Director Caitriona Fitzgerald. “We urge the Senate to quickly take up the Massachusetts Data Privacy Act to put a stop to the data abuse that is harming individuals’ wallets, rights, and opportunities.”

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/best-transcription-services/

The best transcription services we tested

If you're a medical or legal professional needing transcripts of dictations, a journalist looking to transcribe interviews with sources, or part of a team making use of real-time meeting notes, a transcription service can translate audio and video conversations onto paper for you. The best transcription services do this with a high degree of accuracy, whether you're relying on human transcriptionists or AI-powered features.

Will this be repeated in other states? (Will it work?)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/montana-becomes-first-state-close-law-enforcement-data-broker-loophole

Montana Becomes First State to Close the Law Enforcement Data Broker Loophole

Montana has done something that many states and the United States Congress have debated but failed to do: it has just enacted the first attempt to close the dreaded, invasive, unconstitutional, but easily fixed “data broker loophole.” This is a very good step in the right direction because right now, across the country, law enforcement routinely purchases information on individuals it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain.

What does that mean? In every state other than Montana, if police want to know where you have been, rather than presenting evidence and sending a warrant signed by a judge to a company like Verizon or Google to get your geolocation data for a particular set of time, they only need to buy that same data from data brokers. In other words, all the location data apps on your phone collect —sometimes recording your exact location every few minutes—is just sitting for sale on the open market. And police routinely take that as an opportunity to skirt your Fourth Amendment rights.

How could a manual check miss “an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors?” I’m more concerned that the expert relied on the AI which was trained on the work of other experts. Are we about to see a downward spiral?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/anthropics-lawyer-was-forced-to-apologize-after-claude-hallucinated-a-legal-citation/

Anthropic’s lawyer was forced to apologize after Claude hallucinated a legal citation

A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company’s Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court on Thursday.

Claude hallucinated the citation with “an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors,” Anthropic says in the filing, first reported by Bloomberg. Anthropic’s lawyers explain that their “manual citation check” did not catch it, nor several other errors that were caused by Claude’s hallucinations.

Anthropic apologized for the error and called it “an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority.”

Earlier this week, lawyers representing Universal Music Group and other music publishers accused Anthropic’s expert witness — one of the company’s employees, Olivia Chen — of using Claude to cite fake articles in her testimony. Federal judge, Susan van Keulen, then ordered Anthropic to respond to these allegations.