Saturday, August 30, 2025

DHS references Mexican IndyCar driver to promote ‘Speedway Slammer’ detention center; The Guardian, August 7, 2025

Agencies , The Guardian; DHS references Mexican IndyCar driver to promote ‘Speedway Slammer’ detention center


[Kip Currier: Not only is this statement by a DHS spokesperson factually inaccurate, as there's a cogent argument these actions by DHS may negatively impact trademark rights (and rights of publicity) -- “An AI generated image of a car with ‘ICE’ on the side does not violate anyone’s intellectual property rights" -- it's also morally offensive to either recklessly or intentionally appropriate without permission the racing number of one of the top Mexican drivers for use in a DHS promotion that demeans human beings.]


[Excerpt]

"IndyCar driver Pato O’Ward and series officials were shocked by a social media post from the Department of Homeland Security that touts plans for an immigration detention center in Indiana dubbed “Speedway Slammer.” It includes a car with the same number as that of O’Ward, the only Mexican driver in the series.

“It caught a lot of people off guard. Definitely caught me off guard,” O’Ward said Wednesday. “I was just a little bit shocked at the coincidences of that and, you know, of what it means ... I don’t think it made a lot of people proud, to say the least.”

The post on Tuesday included an AI-generated image of a IndyCar-style vehicle with O’Ward’s No 5 that has “ICE” stamped on it. In the image, the car is in front of a jail...

“We were unaware of plans to incorporate our imagery as part of yesterday’s announcement,” IndyCar said in a statement Wednesday. “Consistent with our approach to public policy and political issues, we are communicating our preference that our IP not be utilized moving forward in relation to this matter.”

A DHS spokesperson said it would not change the social media post. “An AI generated image of a car with ‘ICE’ on the side does not violate anyone’s intellectual property rights. Any suggestion to the contrary is absurd,” the spokesperson said in statement. “DHS will continue promoting the ‘Speedway Slammer’ as a comprehensive and collaborative approach to combatting illegal immigration.”

Anthropic’s settlement with authors may be the ‘first domino to fall’ in AI copyright battles; Fortune, August 27, 2025

 BEATRICE NOLAN, Fortune; Anthropic’s settlement with authors may be the ‘first domino to fall’ in AI copyright battles

"The amount of the settlement was not immediately disclosed, but legal experts not involved in the case said the figure could easily reach into the hundreds of millions. It’s also still unclear how the settlement will be distributed among various copyright holders, which could include large publishing houses as well as individual authors.

The case was the first certified class action against an AI company over the use of copyrighted materials, and the quick settlement, which came just one month after the judge ruled the case could proceed to trial as a class action, is a win for the authors, according to legal experts."

Friday, August 29, 2025

Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode; The Guardian, August 29, 2025

 , The Guardian; Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode

"Meanwhile, apparently prompted by his meeting with Vladimir Putin, he is once again at war against postal voting, baselessly decrying it as fraudulent, while also demanding a new census that would exclude undocumented migrants – moves that will either help Republicans win in 2026 or else enable him to argue that a Democratic victory was illegitimate and should be overturned.

In that same spirit, the Trump White House now argues that, in effect, only one party should be allowed to exercise power in the US. How else to read the words of key Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who this week told Fox News that “The Democrat party is not a political party; it is a domestic extremist organisation.”

It’s the same picture on every front, whether it’s plans for a new military parade in Trump’s honour or the firing of health officials who insist on putting science ahead of political loyalty. He is bent on amassing power to himself and being seen to amass power to himself, even if that means departing from economic conservative orthodoxy to have the federal government take a stake in hitherto private companies. He wants to rule over every aspect of US life. As Trump himself said this week, “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” The former Obama adviser David Axelrod is not alone when he says, “We have gone from zero to Hungary faster than I ever imagined.”

The trouble is, people still don’t talk about it the way they talk about Hungary, not inside the US and not outside it. That’s partly the It Can’t Happen Here mindset, partly a reluctance to accept a reality that would require, of foreign governments especially, a rethink of almost everything. If the US is on its way to autocracy, in a condition scholars might call “unconsolidated authoritarianism”, then that changes Britain’s entire strategic position, its place in the world, which for 80 years has been predicated on the notion of a west led by a stable, democratic US. The same goes for the EU. Far easier to carry on, either pretending that the transformation of the US is not, in fact, as severe as it is, or that normal service will resume shortly. But the world’s leaders, like US citizens, cannot ignore the evidence indefinitely. To adapt the title of that long-ago novel, it can happen here – and it is."

Medicare Will Require Prior Approval for Certain Procedures; The New York Times, August 28, 2025

Reed Abelson and  , The New York Times; Medicare Will Require Prior Approval for Certain Procedures


[Kip Currier: Does anyone who receives Medicare -- or cares about someone who does -- really think that letting AI make "prior approvals" for any Medicare procedures is a good thing?

Read the entire article, but just the money quote below should give any thinking person heart palpitations about this AI Medicare pilot project's numerous red flags and conflicts of interest...]


[Excerpt]

"The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections."

Trump Is Ruling by Willful Blindness; The New York Times, August 29, 2025

Hannah Bloch-Wehba, The New York Times; Trump Is Ruling by Willful Blindness


[Kip Currier: This article's author chillingly dissects Trump 's "Execute Order 66-esque" war on information and data. 

Data, in essence, is evidence. And without evidence -- in a court of law, a research laboratory, or a governmental agency  -- it becomes harder to make a case for laws, ethics, and policy. Without data and information, authoritarians can project the sense that they are unfettered by adherence to logic and scientific validity and are inoculated from accountability and the rule of law. In short, they can do whatever they want or don't want to do.

"Destroy, distort, and disregard data" is right out of the authoritarian playbook. Orwell's 1984 showed us that in a work of fiction. But it's on stark display in the real world, too. 

Reading this piece, I recalled having heard about the conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government having literally destroyed hundreds of years of fisheries and environmental data. As Vice reported in 2015 (see The Harper Government Has Trashed and Destroyed Environmental Books and Documents):

In the first few days of 2014, scientists, journalists, and environmentalists were horrified to discover that the Harper government had begun a process to close seven of the 11 of Canada’s world-renowned Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries, citing a consolidation and digitizing effort as the reason. Reports immediately proliferated that the process was undertaken in careless haste, with the officials sent to gather and transfer the documents allegedly neglecting to take proper inventory of the centuries’ worth of documents containing vital information on environmental life, from aquatic ecosystems to water safety and polar research, with some documents reportedly dumped in landfills or burned, leading some scientists to refer to it as a ‘libricide.’ 


Soon after, a widely disseminated photograph emerged displaying a dumpster at the Maurice Lamontage Institute in Mont-Joli Quebec, stuffed with hundreds of carelessly discarded historic books and documents. In Winnipeg, Gaile Whelan-Enns, an environmental researcher with the Manitoba Wildlands told CBC News that he saved hundreds of documents that he found abandoned in an empty library. “It was really hard to figure out where to start because there was so many documents that you just went ‘Oh my God,’” he said, disbelief palpable in his voice. “They just left this lying here?” 

The incautious nature of the consolidation effort adds another alarming chapter to a Harper government that appears deadset on directing how scientific research is conducted in Canada. Last Sunday, CBC’s the Fifth Estate aired an investigation on how the Harper government has dealt with scientists over the past seven years. The doc illustrated a battle between an ideology driven administration and mostly apolitical scientists simply pursuing the facts gleaned from their research, and how it led many to be silenced and defunded.

            https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-harper-government-has-trashed-and-burned-environmental-books-and-documents/  


Sound familiar at all?]

[Excerpt]

"The Trump administration has identified a key weapon in its campaign to remake the federal government: information control. Shortly after taking office, it ordered federal health agencies to freeze their communications with the public. The government promptly scrubbed many of its websites of data about climate change, public health, foreign aid and education. The Department of Government Efficiency slashed federal data-gathering activities, and the president fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a middling July jobs report.

As a scholar of information law and policy, I see a dangerous transformation: Instead of using data to determine how to govern, the administration is manipulating, ignoring and even jettisoning data altogether. Those who balk at the administration’s wishful thinking about reality face threats to fall in line or leave, as Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook and now the C.D.C. director, Susan Monarez, have all experienced.

The administration has clearly embraced the strategic cultivation of uncertainty and ignorance. It is not just trying to trim the fat from its statistical agencies, which were already underfunded before President Trump took office. Nor is it simply trying to spin the available data to its political advantage. Instead, it is turning away from the government’s responsibilities as a steward of information by minimizing, cherry-picking, misusing and sometimes even destroying data.

The idea that government ought to make decisions using evidence and hard data is a cornerstone of our political order...

A government based on deliberate indifference to information and data is a dangerous one. By turning away from evidence when it doesn’t suit, the administration is showing that it doesn’t think it matters whether it has the better argument, so long as it has the power to rule as it desires." 

Putin’s Twisted Drone Scheme Now Has Kids Helping to Kill Kids; The Daily Beast, August 29, 2025

, The Daily Beast ; Putin’s Twisted Drone Scheme Now Has Kids Helping to Kill Kids

"Children as young as 7 are now being forced to join Vladimir Putin’s dystopian drone war, which rained down attacks on Kyiv on Thursday that left 23 people dead, including four kids.

The 7-year-olds are not directly involved in the war in Ukraine, but in a chilling escalation, they will be trained as future drone pilots as part of their education in school from next year. And then, starting in ninth grade, children are being actively recruited to work in a drone factory that is part of a college where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are sent to kill civilians in Ukraine are being manufactured.

Conditions are brutal in the drone factory at Alabuga college, 600 miles west of Moscow, with allegations of bullying and physical abuse. One of the young workers, who asked to be called Kate, told the Daily Beast that she was being reprogrammed into an “unbreakable” part of Putin’s war machine...

Putin said drone piloting had to become a part of the school program to teach children “to pilot, assemble and construct drones.”

“I am convinced that it will make the kids busy with something useful and interesting, distract them from things they should not be doing,” he explained."

Anthropic Settles High-Profile AI Copyright Lawsuit Brought by Book Authors; Wired, August 26, 2025

 Kate Knobs, Wired ; Anthropic Settles High-Profile AI Copyright Lawsuit Brought by Book Authors

"ANTHROPIC HAS REACHED a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of prominent authors, marking a major turn in one of the most significant ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in history. The move will allow Anthropic to avoid what could have been a financially devastating outcome in court."

ChatGPT offered bomb recipes and hacking tips during safety tests; The Guardian, August 28, 2025

 , The Guardian; ChatGPT offered bomb recipes and hacking tips during safety tests

"A ChatGPT model gave researchers detailed instructions on how to bomb a sports venue – including weak points at specific arenas, explosives recipes and advice on covering tracks – according to safety testing carried out this summer.

OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 also detailed how to weaponise anthrax and how to make two types of illegal drugs.

The testing was part of an unusual collaboration between OpenAI, the $500bn artificial intelligence start-up led by Sam Altman, and rival company Anthropic, founded by experts who left OpenAI over safety fears. Each company tested the other’s models by pushing them to help with dangerous tasks.

The testing is not a direct reflection of how the models behave in public use, when additional safety filters apply. But Anthropic said it had seen “concerning behaviour … around misuse” in GPT-4o and GPT-4.1, and said the need for AI “alignment” evaluations is becoming “increasingly urgent”."

Thursday, August 28, 2025

Anthropic’s surprise settlement adds new wrinkle in AI copyright war; Reuters, August 27, 2025

, Reuters; Anthropic’s surprise settlement adds new wrinkle in AI copyright war

"Anthropic's class action settlement with a group of U.S. authors this week was a first, but legal experts said the case's distinct qualities complicate the deal's potential influence on a wave of ongoing copyright lawsuits against other artificial-intelligence focused companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms.

Amazon-backed Anthropic was under particular pressure, with a trial looming in December after a judge found it liable for pirating millions of copyrighted books. The terms of the settlement, which require a judge's approval, are not yet public. And U.S. courts have just begun to wrestle with novel copyright questions related to generative AI, which could prompt other defendants to hold out for favorable rulings."

Think you actually own all those movies you’ve been buying digitally? Think again; The Guardian, August 27, 2025

  , The Guardian; Think you actually own all those movies you’ve been buying digitally? Think again


[Kip Currier: This article underscores why the First Sale Doctrine (Section 109a) of the U.S. Copyright Statute is such a boon for consumers and public libraries: when you (or a library) buy a physical book, you actually do own that physical book (though the copyright to that book remains with the copyright holder, which is an important distinction to remember).

The First Sale Doctrine is what enables a library to purchase physical books and then lend them to as many borrowers as it wants. Not so for digital books, which are generally licensed by publishers to users and libraries who pay for licenses to those digital books.

The bottom line: You as a digital content licensee only retain access to the digital items you license, so long as the holder of that license -- the licensor -- says you may have access to its licensed content.

This distinction between physical and digital content has put great pressure on library budgets to provide users with access to electronic resources, while libraries face ever-increasing fees from licensors. This fiscally-fraught environment has been exacerbated by Trump 2.0's dismantling of IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) grants that supported the licensing of ebooks and audiobooks by libraries. Some states have said "enough" and are attempting to rebalance what some see as an unequal power dynamic between publishers and libraries/users. See "Libraries Pay More for E-Books. Some States Want to Change That. Proposed legislation would pressure publishers to adjust borrowing limits and find other ways to widen access." New York Times (July 16, 2025)]


[Excerpt]

"Regardless of whether the lawsuit is ultimately successful, it speaks to a real problem in an age when people access films, television series, music and video games through fickle online platforms: impermanence. The advent of streaming promised a world of digital riches in which we could access libraries of our favorite content whenever we wanted. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way...

The problem is that you aren’t downloading the movie, to own and watch forever; you’re just getting access to it on Amazon’s servers – a right that only lasts as long as Amazon also has access to the film, which depends on capricious licensing agreements that vary from title to title. A month or five years from now, that license may expire – and the movie will disappear from your Amazon library. Yet the $14.99 you paid does not reappear in your pocket."

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Is Trump right about the Smithsonian? I went to find out.; The Washington Post, August 26, 2025

, The Washington Post; Is Trump right about the Smithsonian? I went to find out.

"I chose this moment to visit the museum because I wanted to see if President Donald Trump’s criticism of the Smithsonian was just his latest expression of resurgent white nationalism — or whether he had a point...

The bottom floors are devoted to, as Trump put it, “how bad Slavery was” — befitting a chapter that not only defined the Black experience in America, but also figured centrally in the Civil War and the country’s social unraveling in the 20th century. No half-intelligent or half-moral person could find anything good to say about slavery, but neither could anything about the museum’s exhibits be construed as anti-White...

I didn’t leave the museum mourning for my country. I left it, as I suspect most of the tourists around me did, stunned by the brutality of American racism but also marveling at the distance the country has traveled — even if we occasionally fall back along the way.

And this is where I fundamentally disagree with Trump and his little band of cultural revolutionaries. I, too, stand by the concept of American exceptionalism, which a lot of my Democratic friends reject as jingoistic. But the Trumpists get its meaning entirely wrong.

America is exceptional not because God wills it so, or because it has the strongest military, or because capitalism is the best economic system on Earth (although it probably is). We are exceptional because we aspire to an ideal that we know can never be met...

What Trump is doing now — trying to sanitize that story, perhaps because he is incapable of admitting fault himself — is the antithesis of what makes America exceptional. To put a happier, less discomfiting spin on the exhibits in this museum would make us more like Russia or China or North Korea, or any other country where history becomes a strongman’s self-serving fairy tale that no one outside the country believes.

We laugh at those strongmen and their mythologies. A generation from now, if I’m right about the pace of our history and the enduring strengths of our country, we’ll laugh at Trump, too."

Trump is targeting several Smithsonian artworks. Here they are.; The Washington Post, August 26, 2025

 The Washington Post; Trump is targeting several Smithsonian artworks. Here they are.


[Kip Currier: Donald Trump and his administration's efforts to remove, revise, and erase artistic and historical content are the opposite of free speech and intellectual freedom. Art should challenge us to think and feel in new ways. We as individuals are certainly free to like a piece of art, hate it, or everything in between on the spectrum of how we feel about it. But the federal (or state) government should not be controlling access to art and suppressing or falsely presenting history in a free democracy. That's what authoritarians and dictators do in non-democratic nations like Russia, China, and North Korea.

If you don't like a particular painting, book, or movie, you can simply walk away from that painting, not read that book, or not watch that movie. But it isn't your right to stop everyone from seeing art, reading books, and watching films. To paraphrase the late Robert Croneberger, Director of the venerable Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and a prolific proponent of intellectual freedom, a library isn't doing its job if it doesn't have at least one item that offends each person.

Similarly, museums, like libraries in healthy democracies, are not meant to reflect a compulsory unitary state viewpoint. We're not the Star Trek Borg Collective where everyone must think alike and individuality is verboten. The mantra of the Borg is that Resistance is Futile. Fortunately, we know that resistance is not futile: we can continue to resist efforts to sanitize art, literature, culture, and history. Exercise your right to consume what you want and disregard what you don't want. But don't tell everyone what they can and can't choose to view and read. That's undemocratic and un-American.]


[Excerpt]

"When the White House posted an article condemning a long list of Smithsonian content last week, it pointed to several specific artworks, a sampling that underlined the kind of material that could be targeted by a president who is increasingly interested in influencing what Americans see in public museums.

The list also criticized Smithsonian exhibition texts, learning materials, past performances and the institution for previously flying the intersex-inclusive Pride flag. This month, President Donald Trump said White House officials were conducting a review of the Smithsonian Institution — months after he signed an executive order seeking to root out “anti-American ideology” in the museum and research complex, an effort that experts say would amount to censorship.

The pieces are an eclectic bunch, united mainly by the Trump administration’s public criticism of them. Not all the artworks are currently on view at the museums. Taken together, they tell a story of a White House that is sensitive to imagery that appears to contradict its messaging, whether it shows a transgender woman cast as the Statue of Liberty or a boy peering over the Southern border...

Here is a look at the artworks named by the White House as evidence that Trump is “right” about the Smithsonian — and how several of the artists have responded."

Jokey Names for Detention Centers Face Criticism for Insensitivity; The New York Times, August 26, 2025

, The New York Times ; Jokey Names for Detention Centers Face Criticism for Insensitivity

"Still, ginning up indignation appears to be the point, at least in part, in this new era of government by troll. It is a strategy that the administration is leaning into in Mr. Trump’s second term — one that his administration is particularly fond of deploying in the realm of immigration enforcement.

The names given to the detention centers are only part of it. The official X accounts of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security make heavy use of the new style — an irreverence synced to the fast-moving ironic currents of the chronically online, detached from concerns about impropriety."

License plate camera company halts cooperation with federal agencies; Associated Press via ABC News, August 25, 2025

JOHN O'CONNOR Associated Press; License plate camera company halts cooperation with federal agencies

"One of the nation's leading operators of automated license-plate reading systems announced Monday it has paused its operations with federal agencies because of confusion and concern — including in Illinois — about the purpose of their investigations.

Flock Safety, whose cameras are mounted in more than 4,000 communities nationwide, put a hold last week on pilot programs with the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection and its law enforcement arm, Homeland Security Investigations, according to a statement by its founder and CEO, Garrett Langley. 

Among officials in other jurisdictions, Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias raised concerns. He announced Monday that an audit found Customs and Border Protection had accessed Illinois data, although he didn't say that the agency was seeking immigration-related information. A 2023 law the Democrat pushed bars sharing license plate data with police investigating out-of-state abortions or undocumented immigrants."

Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Can you copyright artwork made using AI?; NPR, August 25, 2025

"Copyright is the legal system used to reward and protect creations made by humans. But with growing adoption of artificial intelligence, does copyright extend to artwork that’s made using AI? Today on the show, how a test case over a Vincent Van Gogh mashup is testing the boundaries of copyright law."

Monday, August 25, 2025

New Ruling Makes Old Postings a New Copyright Problem; Lexology, August 21, 2025

 Gordon Feinblatt LLC, Lexology; New Ruling Makes Old Postings a New Copyright Problem

 "Go through your website and delete any old photos and music you do not own or have a license to use. Every company and internet user should be diligent and not post any images, music, or other content unless they are certain they have the rights to do so. Lesson number one is: do not merely pluck material from the internet and use it for yourself.

Lesson number two is that copyright owners can now look back more than three years and obtain damages for a long history of infringement. Last year the Supreme Court ruled that copyright damages can reach back to the beginning of the infringing usage so long as a copyright infringement case is properly brought. This means that historical usage of infringing works can rack up many years of damages."

Medical triage as an AI ethics benchmark; Nature, August 22, 2025

, Nature; Medical triage as an AI ethics benchmark

"We present the TRIAGE benchmark, a novel machine ethics benchmark designed to evaluate the ethical decision-making abilities of large language models (LLMs) in mass casualty scenarios. TRIAGE uses medical dilemmas created by healthcare professionals to evaluate the ethical decision-making of AI systems in real-world, high-stakes scenarios. We evaluated six major LLMs on TRIAGE, examining how different ethical and adversarial prompts influence model behavior. Our results show that most models consistently outperformed random guessing, with open source models making more serious ethical errors than proprietary models. Providing guiding ethical principles to LLMs degraded performance on TRIAGE, which stand in contrast to results from other machine ethics benchmarks where explicating ethical principles improved results. Adversarial prompts significantly decreased accuracy. By demonstrating the influence of context and ethical framing on the performance of LLMs, we provide critical insights into the current capabilities and limitations of AI in high-stakes ethical decision making in medicine."

How ChatGPT Surprised Me; The New York Times, August 24, 2025

, The New York Times ; How ChatGPT Surprised Me

"In some corners of the internet — I’m looking at you, Bluesky — it’s become gauche to react to A.I. with anything save dismissiveness or anger. The anger I understand, and parts of it I share. I am not comfortable with these companies becoming astonishingly rich off the entire available body of human knowledge. Yes, we all build on what came before us. No company founded today is free of debt to the inventors and innovators who preceded it. But there is something different about inhaling the existing corpus of human knowledge, algorithmically transforming it into predictive text generation and selling it back to us. (I should note that The New York Times is suing OpenAI and its partner Microsoft for copyright infringement, claims both companies have denied.)

Right now, the A.I. companies are not making all that much money off these products. If they eventually do make the profits their investors and founders imagine, I don’t think the normal tax structure is sufficient to cover the debt they owe all of us, and everyone before us, on whose writing and ideas their models are built...

As the now-cliché line goes, this is the worst A.I. will ever be, and this is the fewest number of users it will have. The dependence of humans on artificial intelligence will only grow, with unknowable consequences both for human society and for individual human beings. What will constant access to these systems mean for the personalities of the first generation to use them starting in childhood? We truly have no idea. My children are in that generation, and the experiment we are about to run on them scares me."

Who owns the copyright for AI work?; Financial Times, August 24, 2025

  , Financial Times; Who owns the copyright for AI work?

"Generative artificial intelligence poses two copyright puzzles. The first is the widely discussed question of compensation for work used to train AI models. The second, which has yet to receive as much attention, concerns the work that AI produces. Copyright is granted to authors. So what happens to work that has no human author?"

Sunday, August 24, 2025

Suetopia: Generative AI is a lawsuit waiting to happen to your business; The Register, August 12, 2025

Adam Pitch, The Register ; Suetopia: Generative AI is a lawsuit waiting to happen to your business

"More and more US companies are using generative AI as a way to save money they might otherwise pay creative professionals. But they're not thinking about the legal bills.

You could be asking an AI to create public-facing communications for your company, such as a logo, promotional copy, or an entire website. If those materials happen to look like copyrighted works, you may be hearing from a lawyer.

"It's pretty clear that if you create something that's substantially similar to a copyrighted work that an infringement has occurred, unless it's for a fair use purpose," said Kit Walsh, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Director of AI and Access-to-Knowledge Legal Projects."

Using AI for Work Could Land You on the Receiving End of a Nasty Lawsuit; Futurism, August 23, 2025

JOE WILKINS , Futurism; Using AI for Work Could Land You on the Receiving End of a Nasty Lawsuit

"For all its hype, artificial intelligence isn't without its psychologicalenvironmental, and even spiritual hazards.

Perhaps the most pressing concern on an individual level, though, is that it puts users on the hook for a nearly infinite number of legal hazards — even at work, as it turns out.


A recent breakdown by The Register highlights the legal dangers of AI use, especially in corporate settings. If you use generative AI software to spit out graphics, press releases, logos, or videos, you and your employer could end up facing six-figure damages, the publication warns.


This is thanks to the vast archive of copyrighted data that virtually all commercial generative AI models are trained on.


The Register uses Nintendo's Mario as a prime example of how one might stumble, intentionally or not, into a massive copyright lawsuit, regardless of intent to infringe: if you use AI to generate a cutesy mascot for your plumbing company that looks too much like the iconic videogame character, you could easily find yourself in the legal crosshairs of the notoriously litigious corporation.


"The real harm comes from the attorney's fees that you can get saddled with," intellectual property lawyer Benjamin Bedrava told the publication. "Because you could have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in attorney's fees over something where the license would have been fifteen hundred dollars.""