17 Articles about AI & Legal Issues

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5 Critical AI Legal Issues Every Business Must Navigate – Forbes

Artist appeals copyright denial for prize-winning AI-generated work - ArsTechnica

Podcast: AI and Voice Replication  - Illusion of More

YouTube Develops Tool to Allow Creators to Detect AI-Generated Content Using Their Likeness – Hollywood Reporter

FBI busts musician’s elaborate AI-powered $10M streaming-royalty heist – ArsTechnica 

Supio brings generative AI to personal injury cases – Tech Crunch 

Mickey Mouse Smoking: How AI Image Tools Are Generating New Content-Moderation Problems – Wall Street Journal 

Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court? – Associated Press  

Watermarking in Images Will Not Solve AI-Generated Content Abuse – Data Innovation 

Amid New York Times Lawsuit, ChatGPT Is Citing Plagiarized Versions of NYT Articles on an Armenian Content Mill – Futurism  

Bill to Outlaw AI Deepfakes Backed by SAG-AFTRA – Variety

The European Union’s world-first artificial intelligence rules are officially taking effect - Associated Press  

Buzzfeed sends ‘cease and desist’ letter over AI aggregator’s logo – Press Gazette  

The Push to Develop Generative A.I. Without All the Lawsuits – New York Times 

AI can’t make music — but that doesn’t mean it poses an empty threat to musicians – The Atlantic 

The music industry is coming for AI – NPR

Judge sharply criticizes lawyers for authors in AI suit against Meta – Politico

The Ethical Task

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Self-actualization is not merely a good to be desired, but rather a task, something human persons have been assigned to do and which they will be held responsible for achieving or failing to achieve.

Of course, not everyone is aware of this ethical task. (Kierkegaard) says that a great many people drift through life, “managing with custom and tradition” in their respective cities. Such people live their lives in a way similar to the way children who have not been taught table manners might get by at a fancy party: “Watch the other polite children and behave as they do.” Someone who lives life this way lacks… “authenticity” or “originality.” Such a person “would never do anything first and would never have any opinion unless he first knew that other had it.”

C. Steven Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction

Looking Down

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A small but detailed 2015 study of young adults found that participants were using their phones five hours a day, at 85 separate times. Most of these interactions were for less than 30 seconds, but they add up. Just as revealing: The users weren’t fully aware of how addicted they were. They thought they picked up their phones half as much as they actually did. Whether they were aware of it or not, a new technology had seized control of around one-third of these young adults’ waking hours.

Just look around you—at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children. Observe yourself in line for coffee, or in a quick work break, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.

Andrew Sullivan, I used to Be a Human Being

18 Articles about AI & the Bigger Questions

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4 Family Types

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There are basically four family types that we all come from. 

1 - The Traditional Family System

The old-fashioned family has a myth that “father knows best.”  This family is under the control of only one member. 

2 - Enmeshed Family System

The frightened family has a myth that it's “us against the world.”  It is emotionally bound together and protective of itself. 

3 - The Fighting Family System

The fighting family has a myth of “every man for himself.”  Each member of this family is strongly individualistic, recognizing no other authority than his (or her) own.

4 - The Open Family System

The healthy family system theme is “all for one and one for all.” The open family system emphasizes the worth, dignity, and uniqueness of each individual, the importance of unconditional positive regard, and the value of positive reinforcement.

7 Quotes about the Limitations of AI

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While AI can enhance individual creativity, it might do so at the expense of collective diversity and novelty in creative works. PsyPost

The AI programs aren’t necessarily doing something no human can; they’re doing something no human can in such a short period of time. Sometimes that’s great, as when an AI model quickly solves a scientific challenge that would have taken a researcher years. Sometimes that’s terrifying, as when (they appear) capable of replacing entire production studios. -The Atlantic

“On average 30% of the time the AI models spread misinformation when asked about claims in the news. On average 29% of the time, the AI models simply refused to respond to prompts about false claims in the news over the past month. Instead, the models delivered only non-responsive responses.” -News Guard

While AI models are starting to replicate musical patterns, it is the breaking of rules that tends to produce era-defining songs. Algorithms ‘are great at fulfilling expectations but not good at subverting them, but that’s what often makes the best music,’ Eric Drott, a music-theory professor at the University of Texas at Austin.” How can we be more human than an AI? Produce creative work that goes beyond the expected, the predictable, the established and popular. -The Atlantic

Recent brain scans suggest we don’t need language to think. A group of neuroscientists now argue that our words are primarily for communicating, not for reasoning. "Separating thought and language could help explain why AI systems like ChatGPT are so good at some tasks and so bad at others. These programs mimic the language network in the human brain — but fall short on reasoning." - New York Times

If an LLM can be trained on 17th-century texts, it can just as easily be trained on QAnon forums, or a dataset that presupposes the superiority of one religion or political system. Use a deeply skewed bubble machine like that to try to understand a book, a movie, or someone's medical records and the results will be inherently biased against whatever — or whoever — got left out of the training material. -Business Insider

At times, A.I. chatbots have stumbled with simple arithmetic and math word problems that require multiple steps to reach a solution, something recently documented by some technology reviewers. The A.I.’s proficiency is getting better, but it remains a shortcoming. -New York Times

How to Pick a Leader

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Try to ignore everything that is style and not substance. We should de-emphasize things like credentials, expertise, and experience, especially when they apply to something people have done before but is not so relevant for the future. Most of us are less likely to lose our jobs to AI than to reimagine our current roles while working out how to use AI to add value in different ways. Less focus on hard skills and more focus on the right soft skills.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Columbia University

Those who must be in control

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Imperative people can have too strong a sense of responsibility. In pushing themselves to do right, they often pay the price of burnout. When others encourage them to slow down, they won’t for fear that a bad habit of laziness might develop. Or perhaps someone will be displeased. The saying, “When you want something done, ask the busiest person in town to do it” may contain a lot of truth. Especially if the busiest person in town doesn’t have the ability to say no.

Les Carter, Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control

Self-Deception

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The psychologist Ray Hyman has spent most of his life studying the art of deception. Before he entered the halls of science, he worked as a magician and then moved on to mentalism after discovering he could make more money reading palms than performing card tricks. The crazy thing about Hyman’s career as a palm reader is, like many psychics, over time he began to believe he actually did have psychic powers. The people who came to him were so satisfied, so bowled over, he thought he must have a real gift. Subjective validation cuts both ways.

Hyman was using a technique called cold reading where you start with the wide-angle lens of generalities and watch the other person for cues so you can constrict the iris down to what seems like a powerful insight into the other person’s soul. It works because people tend to ignore the little misses and focus on the hits. As he worked his way through college, another mentalist, Stanley Jaks, took Hyman aside and saved him from delusion by asking him to try something new – tell people the opposite of what he believed their palms revealed. The result? They were just as flabbergasted by his abilities, if not more so. Cold reading was powerful, but tossing it aside he was still able to amaze. Hyman realized what he said didn’t matter as long as his presentation was good. The other person was doing all the work, tricking themselves, seeing the general as the specific.

Mediums and palm readers, those who speak for the dead or see into the beyond for cash, depend on subjective validation. Remember, your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises. You are a creature impelled to hope. As you attempt to make sense of the world you focus on what falls into place and neglect that which doesn’t fit, and there is so much in life that does not fit.

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

Wasting Our Love

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We may have a feeling of love for mankind, and this feeling may also be useful in providing us with enough energy to manifest genuine love for a few specific individuals. But genuine love for a relatively few individuals is all that is within our power. To attempt to exceed the limits of our energy is to offer more than we can deliver, and there is a point of no return beyond which an attempt to love all comers becomes fraudulent and harmful to the very ones we desire to assist.

Consequently if we are fortunate enough to be in a position in which many people ask for our attention, we must choose those among them whom we are actually to love. This choice is not easy; it may be excruciatingly painful, as the assumption of godlike power so often is. But it must be made.

Many factors need to be considered, primarily the capacity of a prospective recipient of our love to respond to that love with spiritual growth. It is unquestionable that there are many whose spirits are so locked in behind impenetrable armor that even the greatest efforts to nurture the growth of those spirits are doomed to almost certain failure.

To attempt to love someone who cannot benefit from your love with spiritual growth is to waste your energy, to cast your seed upon arid ground. Genuine love is precious, and those who are capable of genuine love know that their loving must be focused as productively as possible through self-discipline.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Literature and Rigid Thinking

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Want someone to get past their rigid thinking and increase their openness? Put a novel in their hands. Canadian researchers say it will help them become more sophisticated thinkers and increase their creativity.  

University of Toronto students were asked to read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. Afterward, they each filled out a survey to measure the desire for certainty and stability. The short story readers had much lower scores on that test than those who read the essays. The fiction readers showed they needed less order and had more comfort with ambiguity. This was particularly true for participants who already read regularly.  

Writing in the Creativity Research Journal, the researchers say, “Exposure to literature may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.” 

Fiction readers can more easily follow thinking styles that differ from their own—they can feel along with characters they may not even like—gaining a better understanding of the viewpoint. 

Read more about the study here. 

Stephen Goforth

Regretting your Choices

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The choices we make are statements to the world about who we are. When all you could do was buy Lee’s or Levi’s, the jeans you bought were not a statement to the world about who you are because there wasn’t enough variety in the jeans you bought to capture the variety of human selves. When there are 2,000 kinds of jeans, or 20,000 kinds of jeans, well, now all of a sudden it is a statement to the world about who you are because there’s so much variety out there. This is true of jeans. It’s true of drinks. It’s true of music videos. It’s true of movies. That makes even trivial decisions seem important, and when that happens, people want the best. We’ve got a bunch of studies that show that large choice sets induce people to regard the choices they make as statements about the self, and that, in turn, induces them to raise their standards.If there are 200, and you buy a pair of jeans that don’t fit you as well as you hoped, now it’s hard to avoid blaming yourself. The only way to avoid regretting a decision is not making it, so I think a lot of the reason people don’t pull the trigger is that they’re so worried that when they do pull the trigger, they’ll regret a choice they made.

Barry Schwartz quoted in Vox

15 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators

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