Nicole Brachetti Peretti , Time; AI Regulation is Not Enough. We Need AI Morals
"Pope Leo XIV recently called for “builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work—to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”
Some tech leaders, including Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen have mocked such calls. But to do so is a mistake. We don’t just need AI regulation—we need AI morals."
Michael Levenson, The New York Times; Former Chess Champion Faces Ethics Complaint After a Grandmaster’s Death
"The global governing body for the game of chess said on Tuesday that it had filed an ethics complaint against a Russian grandmaster and former world champion who was accused of bullying Daniel Naroditsky, a popular American grandmaster, before Mr. Naroditsky died last month at age 29.
The organization, the International Chess Federation, filed the complaint after many in the chess world expressed anger that the former world champion, Vladimir Kramnik, had repeatedly insinuated, in videos, comments and posts, that Mr. Naroditsky had cheated when he played chess online."
Nate Jones , The Washington Post; State Department deleted records about risk of inadvertent nuclear war
"I blinked and blinked again, until I was finally satisfied that I was not hallucinating: Key historical records had been removed without explanation.
The State Department had deleted history.
Let me back up. Since 1991, the department has been required by law to publish “a thorough, accurate, and reliable” history of U.S. foreign policy within 30 years of the events. It does this in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, curated collections of primary source documents abbreviated as FRUS.
The State Department has published more than 450 volumes, which include thousands of primary source records detailing the crafting of U.S. foreign policy dating back to the Lincoln administration. The thick, bound ruby buckram volumes are a staple on the bookshelves of many college history departments where they remain an invaluable tool for students, scholars and authors.
But in the internet era, FRUS has become a predominantly digital publication, hosted on the State Department’s website.
And it is easier to delete digital records than to destroy books.
This January, the State Department did just that when it republished on its website a volume about the Reagan administration — without 15 pages on the risk of inadvertent nuclear war sparked by a 1983 NATO exercise."
MATILDA BATTERSBY , The Bookseller; OpenAI copyright case reveals 'ease with which generative AI can devastate the market', says PA
"A judge’s ruling that legal action by authors against OpenAI for copyright infringement can go ahead reveals “the ease with which generative AI can devastate the market”, according to the Publishers Association (PA).
Last week, a federal judge in the US refused OpenAI’s attempts to dismiss claims by authors that text summaries of published works by ChatGPT (which is owned by OpenAI) infringes their copyrights.
The lawsuit, which is being heard in New York, brings together cases from a number of authors, as well as the Authors Guild, filed in various courts.
In his ruling, which upheld the authors’ right to attempt to sue OpenAI, District Judge Sidney Stein compared George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones to summaries of the novel created by ChatGPT.
Judge Stein said: “[A] discerning observer could easily conclude that this detailed summary is substantially similar to Martin’s original work because the summary conveys the overall tone and feel of the original work by parroting the plot, characters and themes of the original.”
The class action consolidates 12 complaints being brought against OpenAI and Microsoft. It argues copyrighted books were reproduced to train OpenAI’s artificial intelligence large language models (LLM) and, crucially, that LLMs, including ChatGPT, can infringe copyright via their output, ie the text produced when asked a question.
This landmark legal case is the first to examine whether the output of an AI chatbot infringes copyright, rather than looking at whether the training of the model was an infringement."
Adam Nagourney, Heather Knight, Kellen Browning and Laurel Rosenhall, The New York Times ; A Light in Very Dark Days: Nancy Pelosi and AIDS
"Ms. Pelosi, the new member of Congress representing San Francisco at the time, asked the nurses if they had what they needed and if any patients were up for a bedside visit. Then she would slip into their rooms alone.
“Early on, it was not seen as a wise or popular thing to do, to champion people with AIDS, of all things,” Mr. Wolf, 74, recalled. “You didn’t want to align yourself too closely, but she didn’t care. We were her constituents, and she went to bat for us over and over and over again.”...
Ms. Pelosi, who announced on Thursday her plans to retire from Congress, is known nationally as a Washington leader praised by Democrats for standing up to President Trump and derided by Republicans as a symbol of the radical excesses of the left. But back home, her reputation was shaped by how she stepped forward at the earliest and most terrifying moment of a local crisis and how she fought to help her constituents deal with the AIDS epidemic and fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
The public side of this is by now well-known: How over decades spent in Congress she fought for money for AIDS research and treatment or invited prominent AIDS and gay rights activists to be at her side at the State of the Union address and other events. But much of it took place away from the public eye. It’s those moments many of her gay constituents in San Francisco talk about as she approaches the end of her congressional career."
"Debra D’Agostino, a federal employment lawyer, argued that Mei probably has a strong case against her dismissal. Mei’s speech was almost certainly protected under both the First Amendment and the Whistleblower Protection Act, D’Agostino said.
There have been at least two Supreme Court cases — Pickering v. Board of Education in 1968 and Department of Homeland Security v. MacLean in 2015 — in which the justices decided in favor of staffers accused by their employers of speaking out of turn, D’Agostino noted. In the first, the court ruled for a teacher who had written to a newspaper criticizing the superintendent, saying the educator had a right to speak on matters of public concern so long as she was not knowingly lying.
In the second, the court ruled for a Transportation Security Administration staffer who the government accused of revealing “sensitive security information” to a reporter. In that case, the court decided the staffer’s activity was covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act, which says federal workers can report lawbreaking or anything that poses a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety."
Thomas Banchoff , The Washington Post; What happened to mercy?
"Decades ago, Pope John Paul II made a plea for mercy. His 1980 encyclical “Dives in Misericordia” (“Rich in Mercy”) emphasized God’s forgiving love toward humanity and decried a widespread tendency to “remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy.” Instead of mercy, John Paul saw a rise in “spite, hatred and even cruelty.”
Mercy is painfully scarce in our politics today. When the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, appealed to President Donald Trump from the pulpit in January to show mercy toward the vulnerable, the president bristled and demanded an apology. In the months since, his administration’s policies have been rife with cruelty, from eliminating life-giving aid programs abroad to threatening to withhold food assistance for more than 40 million Americans."
Elizabeth Dias , The New York Times; Catholic Bishops Rebuke U.S. ‘Mass Deportation’ of Immigrants
"America’s Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday rebuked the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign in a rare and near-unanimous statement that framed the immigration crisis in starkly moral terms.
The statement, passed at the bishops’ annual conference in Baltimore, did not call out President Trump by name, but the context was clear. The bishops said they “oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and “pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”
“We as Catholic bishops love our country and pray for its peace and prosperity,” the statement said. “For this very reason, we feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.”
The bishops, who were often divided by American politics in the Pope Francis era, showed a united front in standing behind Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States, who has spoken out for immigrants and urged U.S. bishops to do the same."
Sara Braun , The Guardian; One-third of museums lost government funding since Trump took office, survey says
"One-third of US museums have lost government grants or contracts since Donald Trump took office, according to a new survey.
The findings, released by the American Alliance of Museums on Tuesday and based on responses from more than 500 museum directors across the US, shed new light on the challenges cultural institutions are facing under the Trump administration.
Among the museums affected by cancelled government contracts or unreimbursed expenditures, the survey found that the median loss was $30,000. The most common cancelled grants were from the Institute of Museum of Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Two-thirds of the respondent museums reported that the lost funding has not been replaced by foundations, sponsors or donors."
David A. Graham, The Atlantic; Baseball’s Big Whiff on Gambling
"Gambling is a numbers game, so here are a few: The pitcher Emmanuel Clase’s 2025 salary from Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians is $4.5 million dollars. This weekend, prosecutors unveiled charges that he had made just $12,000 from two recent rigged pitches. And he could face as many as 65 years in prison (though such a stiff sentence seems unlikely).
Clase and the fellow Guardians hurler Luis Ortiz were indicted last week for their involvement in the scheme, which allegedly netted bettors hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Attorneys for Clase and Ortiz have denied the allegations.) The scheme outlined in the indictment is the latest instance of legalized gambling’s corrosive influence on professional sports. Major leagues have welcomed the industry with open arms and greedy palms, signing contracts with betting companies and bringing casinos into stadiums and arenas, but they act astonished when gambling starts to corrupt their own players."
Evan Gorelick , The New York Times; Vigilante Lawyers Expose the Rising Tide of A.I. Slop in Court Filings
"Mr. Freund is part of a growing network of lawyers who track down A.I. abuses committed by their peers, collecting the most egregious examples and posting them online. The group hopes that by tracking down the A.I. slop, it can help draw attention to the problem and put an end to it.
While judges and bar associations generally agree that it’s fine for lawyers to use chatbots for research, they must still ensure their filings are accurate.
But as the technology has taken off, so has misuse. Chatbots frequently make things up, and judges are finding more and more fake case law citations, which are then rounded up by the legal vigilantes.
“These cases are damaging the reputation of the bar,” said Stephen Gillers, an ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Lawyers everywhere should be ashamed of what members of their profession are doing.”...
The problem, though, keeps getting worse.
That’s why Damien Charlotin, a lawyer and researcher in France, started an online database in April to track it.
Initially he found three or four examples a month. Now he often receives that many in a day.
Many lawyers, including Mr. Freund and Mr. Schaefer, have helped him document 509 cases so far. They use legal tools like LexisNexis for notifications on keywords like “artificial intelligence,” “fabricated cases” and “nonexistent cases.”
Some of the filings include fake quotes from real cases, or cite real cases that are irrelevant to their arguments. The legal vigilantes uncover them by finding judges’ opinions scolding lawyers."
Katelyn Chedraoui, CNET ; AI Has Sent Copyright Laws Into Chaos. What You Need to Know About Your Rights Online
"You might not think about copyright very often, but we are all copyright owners and authors. In the age of generative AI, copyright has quickly become one of the most important issues in the development and outputs of chatbots, image and video generators...
What does all of this mean for the future?
Copyright owners are in a bit of a holding pattern for now. But beyond the legal and ethical implications, copyright in the age of AI raises important questions about the value of creative work, the cost of innovation and the ways in which we need or ought to have government intervention and protections."
Dan Montgomery , American Libraries; Ready to Go: Joining the fight to defend libraries, workers, and the right to read
"When the interview committee asked why I was interested in the executive director position at the American Library Association (ALA), I replied, doing my best impression of famed mountaineer George Mallory: “Because it’s the ALA!” I was responding, of course, to my belief in libraries and in the right to read, both of which have been under serious attack. And library workers and advocates who defend reading, books, and unfettered access to knowledge are critical to protecting American democracy. So, to be part of the organization most squarely in the forefront of that cause seemed to me an unmissable opportunity, and a great honor."
Lanre Bakare, The Guardian ; ‘This is fascist America’: Anish Kapoor may sue after border agents pose by his sculpture
"The artist Anish Kapoor is considering taking legal action after border patrol agents posed for a photo in front of his Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago, saying the scene represented “fascist America”...
Kapoor took legal action against the National Rifle Association (NRA) after they used an image of Cloud Gate, which was installed in 2006 and is known locally as “the Bean”, in an advert.
He settled out of court with the NRA in 2018. “It’s a bit more complicated with this,” Kapoor said of the more recent incident, “because they’re a full, if you like, national army unit.”"
Jörn Poltz and Friederike Heine, Reuters ; OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws, German court says
"OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by reproducing lyrics from songs by best-selling musician Herbert Groenemeyer and others, a court ruled on Tuesday, in a closely watched case against the U.S. firm over its use of lyrics to train its language models.
The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, including Groenemeyer's hits "Maenner" and "Bochum"."
Annie Karni and Devlin Barrett, The New York Times ; Trump Ramps Up Pressure on G.O.P. to Thwart Epstein Vote
[Kip Currier: What and who is in the Epstein files that the Trump administration doesn't want us to see?
Why are Trump 2.0 and the GOP desperate to impede the release of the Epstein files?
What do they fear will be revealed?
What do they think the consequences may be if the American people finally know the contents of these documents?
Does this look like normal behavior if there really is "nothing to see" in these files?
If someone in your own personal or professional life were engaging in these kinds of tactics to hide records would it raise your suspicions?
What can and will be done to attain transparency of these records?]
[Excerpt]
"President Trump and his administration on Wednesday ramped up a pressure campaign on congressional Republicans who are pushing for a full release of the Justice Department’s files about the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, rushing to head off a House vote on the matter."
Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, The New York Times ; To Help SNAP Recipients, Bookstores Set Up as Food Banks
"With federal funding for food stamps threatened, employees at a bookstore in Lincoln, Neb., went to their boss with an idea: If people were going hungry, maybe they could help.
Workers at the store, Sower Books, soon set up a food collection bin near the front door. Customers and neighbors brought in bags and boxes of groceries; others came to browse for books, saw the bin and returned later with their own donations. Within a week, the storage room was stuffed with close to 2,000 pounds of food.
Nearly out of storage space, the bookstore put out a call for drivers on social media, and earlier this month, customers volunteered their cars and pickup trucks to ferry boxed and canned goods to a food pantry across town. The store’s back room has since filled up again with donations. On Monday, staff members made another run to the pantry, delivering more than 830 pounds of food — enough for roughly 1,700 meals...
Tory Hall, Sower’s owner, said the food drive felt like a natural extension of the store’s role as a community gathering place, where people drop in to do puzzles, have coffee, attend a book club and snuggle with the store’s adoptable rescue cats. Many customers seemed grateful that Sower gave them an easy way to help, Hall said.
“We’re not sitting here sad that everything is burning,” Hall said. “We’re going to find a fire extinguisher.”"
Johnny Ryan and Georg Riekeles, The Guardian ; The EU has let US tech giants run riot. Diluting our data law will only entrench their power
"Europe is hurtling toward digital vassalage. Under Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, EU laws to tackle tech giants have been either not applied or delayed, for fear of offending Donald Trump. Now leaked documents reveal that the European Commission plans to gut a central part of Europe’s digital rulebook. This will hurt Europe’s innovators and hand the future of Europe’s tech sovereignty to US firms.
Once Europe’s most hyped law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now on the chopping block. Powerful forces within the European Commission, supported by the German government, hope that deregulation will boost Europe’s tech sector, particularly AI. This is a grave mistake."
Mary Shaw and , The New York Times ; You’re a Computer Science Major. Don’t Panic.
"The future of computer science education is to teach students how to master the indispensable skill of supervision.
Why? Because the speed and efficiency of using A.I. to write code is balanced by the reality that it often gets things wrong. These tools are designed to produce results that look convincing, but may still contain errors. A recent survey showed that over half of professional developers use A.I. tools daily, but only about one-third trust their accuracy. When asked what their greatest frustration is about using A.I. tools, two-thirds of respondents answered, “A.I. solutions that are almost right but not quite.”
There is still a need for humans to play a role in coding — a supervisory one, where programmers oversee the use of A.I. tools, determine if A.I.-generated code does what it is supposed to do and make essential repairs to defective code."
[Kip Currier: On this Veterans Day -- and every day -- thank you to all those who have served, are serving, and have given their lives or been injured in service to our country and the ideals of peace and freedom for the world.
My Great-Uncle Paul Page Currier (1895-1940) served as a Corporal in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War I. One of my family archival treasures is a framed 1919 newspaper article about Paul in the long-defunct Mercer, Pennsylvania newspaper, The Western Press. The Friday, February 28, 1919 all-caps front-page top-of-the-fold article PAUL CURRIER IN FIERCE FIGHT: CLOTHES RIDDLED WITH SHOTS recounts his time in battle-torn northeastern France via a letter that he wrote to my Great-Grandmother, Nettie Nancy Page Currier (1864-1946). The article's sub-headline reads:
Thrilling Story of an Encounter With Huns in Argonne Forest --- Only Two of Squad Left to Advance After Shell Struck Them
The article incorporates an entire letter (dated January 29, 1919, Villiers, France) from Paul to his mother, shedding light on the harrowing experiences of his unit. (I am working on a separate blog post that will include the full-text of the article.) An especially poignant part of Paul's letter provides a first-hand sense of the trials and tolls of military service, as he describes a November 1918 battle in the Argonne Forest, as a member of the U.S. Army's Eightieth Division, machine gunners, 319th Infantry, Company K:
When I got ready to advance again I only had two men in the squad who could follow me, the rest of the seven were badly wounded or killed. That was the last push I was in, and am glad of it, too, for have seen all I care to see of war.
Thankfully, unlike far too many service members, Paul Currier was able to come home from the war. Regrettably though, his health was impacted by exposure to mustard gas on the battlefront, which led to his untimely death in his mid-40's.
My late father, James Hughes Currier, served as a Captain in the U.S. Air Force and our family had the privilege of being stationed for several years on the now-decommissioned Niagara Falls, New York U.S. Air Force Base.]
[Excerpt]
"Eighty-one years ago this week, men from the advancing U.S. Army stood in a rain-soaked farm field in Margraten, the Netherlands, and established a cemetery. Over the winter and spring that followed, the bloody final months of World War II in Europe transformed that quiet stretch of land into a huge American cemetery, its soil turned over with thousands of fresh graves.
The fields at Margraten would become one of 14 permanent overseas military cemeteries set aside for America’s World War II dead that the U.S. government maintains in perpetuity. These beautiful, haunting places were dedicated by still-grieving Americans in the years that followed the war, remembering its awful costs and praying for a lasting peace.
There are fewer and fewer people still alive who lived through World War II. Margraten and the other cemeteries serve as reminders of the sacrifices that Americans made to free Europe. And, at a time when many Americans want to retreat from our responsibilities to the rest of the world, they offer us a warning.
The American service members buried in the soil of Europe grew up in a country where many respectable politicians claimed America had no business preserving peace on the European continent or promoting freedom in the world. There was no NATO, no United Nations, no American-led global order."
KAREN WOOLSTRUM , University of Pittsburgh Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship; Pitt School of Medicine Student Innovator is Empowering People to Take Charge of Their Healthcare
"Inspiration Strikes in the ER
While her research focuses on cystic fibrosis, Li’s entrepreneurial journey began during a rotation in the emergency room. It dawned on her that many patients in the ER could be empowered to take control of their own health monitoring and potentially avoid traumatic and costly ER visits. She quickly devised an idea for an electronic stethoscope that people can use to measure vital signs of the heart and lungs from home.
In collaboration with a friend, Akshaya Anand, a machine-learning graduate student from the University of Maryland, she founded Korion Health and entered the 2022 Randall Family Big Idea Competition hosted by the Big Idea Center, Pitt’s hub for student innovation (part of the OIE).
They were awarded a modest $2,000 4th-place prize, but the value they received from the month-long competition and mentorship extended far beyond that. The experience of crafting her pitch and having her idea validated in the eyes of experienced entrepreneurs gave her the confidence to continue pursuing the device’s commercial potential.
Next up was a pitch competition hosted by the Product Development Managers Association (PDMA) in which she won free first place in the graduate-student category, with the award including consulting hours from local companies such as Bally Design and Lexicon Design that she said “helped me take my half-baked idea and turn it into a prototype to show to investors.”
“This was a high yield for the effort. If it’s something they can hold in their hands it really helps communicate the value proposition,” she added.
From there, things began to snowball. On the same day that she won the UpPrize Social Innovation Competition sponsored by Bank of New York in the racial equity category ($75k), she won the first place prize from the American Heart Association’s EmPOWERED to Serve Business Accelerator ($50k). The resulting publicity attracted the attention of organizers of the Hult Prize Competition, a global student startup competition that receives thousands of applicants each year, who invited her to apply.
“I didn’t know anything about the Hult Prize competition. At first, I thought it was spam,” she admitted.
She had no illusions of advancing to the finals near London, let alone winning the top prize of $1 million: until she did."
Annie Galvin and Claire Gordon
, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; The Blue Wave Cometh?"Klein: [Laughs.] So this Judith Shklar essay that you’re mentioning — I want to read another part that you had sent me because I think it gets at this conversation we’re having in an interesting way, as well as at something that I am trying to get at when I talk about love or respect or politics as a difficult but worthwhile act.
Virtues are hard to carry out. That is why they are virtues. If they were easy, they wouldn’t be virtues.
So Shklar writes:
Courage is to be prized since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats both physical and moral. This is to be sure not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set and still before us is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence but between cruel military and moral repression and violence and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, Black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is in fact extremely difficult and constraining. Far too much so for those of us who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity and the risks of freedom.
I do find something very inspiring in that.
Retica: I hoped you would. [Laughs.]
Klein: Not just that liberalism should be about trying to protect against fear, about cruelty, but this idea that it actually takes tremendous courage, that it takes tremendous self-discipline, that it is a part of yourself that you are honing and working on and strengthening — a muscle you are strengthening.
There’s something Obama has been saying as he’s been back on the trail in the last couple of weeks that I found interesting. He said it, too, in his interview with Marc Maron: that for a lot of us, none of what we believed has been hard. We didn’t grow up at a time when it was hard to believe in political freedom, hard to speak our mind. There was no risk to any of it — not really. There have been at other times in our history — Jim Crow, the Red Scare, World War II.
He said: It has not asked that much of us to believe in political freedom, to believe in liberalism. And all of a sudden it does. And right now we’re seeing who is willing to have that asked of them — who’s willing to believe some of these things when it’s hard.
And his point was that a lot of the leaders in civil society, business leaders and so on, have performed very poorly in this era. They’ve bent the knee — particularly compared with the first era of Trumpism.
Now they go give Donald Trump golden gifts in the White House. They are very much willing to pay to play. And not just pay money, but pay out in terms of other people’s freedoms. Pay out in terms of other people’s safety. Pay out in the kind of society that, if you had explained it to them a couple of years ago, they would have told you they did not want to live in that."
