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Category Archives: Legal Research

A.I. Is Sucking the Entire Internet In. What If You Could Yank Some Back Out?

Slate: “Over the coming years, A.I. companies will release even more advanced models that will remind us that this is just the beginning. At least one of these tools will be different in an important way: It will be prohibited from seeing 80 million of the images that helped teach its predecessors to draw and paint. If you think of A.I. image training sets as lesson plans and word-to-image tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion as college students, it’s kind of like saying that incoming freshmen are prohibited from taking one of the outgoing seniors’ core requirement classes. Why? Because two Berlin-based musicians persuaded the head of a multibillion-dollar company to give artists more power. Many illustrators, designers, and photographers are furious that their work had been scraped from the internet to train an A.I. Last September, Mathew Dryhust, an artist and academic, and the experimental electronic artist Holly Herndon, created HaveIBeenTrained, a tool that enables you to see if your images have been used and then request that future A.I. models avoid them. It recently became clear that this was more than a subversive art project when the CEO of the company behind Stable Diffusion, one of the most widely used A.I. image generators, gave people a March 3 deadline to opt out using Herndon and Dryhurst’s tool. Millions of requests poured in, Dryhurst told me. As of this week, around 40,000 artists and many companies, including Shutterstock, a major image distributor, have opted out.

Nearly 200 Other Banks Vulnerable To SVB-Style Collapse

Jiang, Erica Xuewei and Matvos, Gregor and Piskorski, Tomasz and Seru, Amit, Monetary Tightening and U.S. Bank Fragility in 2023: Mark-to-Market Losses and Uninsured Depositor Runs? (March 13, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4387676 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4387676 “We analyze U.S. banks’ asset exposure to a recent rise in the interest rates with implications for financial stability. The… Continue Reading

Visualizing Political Bias in Bicameral Legislatures

The Economist – See the visualization here: “Left-of-centre Americans often bemoan their country’s Senate, in which each state gets two seats regardless of population. This has always given the least populous states extra sway in the upper chamber of Congress. But in recent years, smaller states have become more Republican, and Democrats have called for… Continue Reading

Utah parent says the Bible contains porn – remove from school libraries

The Salt Lake Tribune: “Frustrated by the books being removed from school libraries, a Utah parent says there’s one that hasn’t been challenged yet, but that they believe should be, for being “one of the most sex-ridden books around.”So they’ve submitted a request for their school district in Davis County to now review the Bible… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 25, 2023

Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 25, 2023 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly… Continue Reading

Internet Archive

Internet Archives Blog: “Today’s lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve. This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only… Continue Reading

Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?

The New Yorker – According to the lawyer behind a new class-action suit, every image that a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.” By Kyle Chayka – “…Last month, McKernan joined a class-action lawsuit with two other artists, Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz, filed by the attorneys Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri, against… Continue Reading

2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Europe Report

“The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Europe Report is the firm’s 23rd annual trust and credibility survey. The research was produced by the Edelman Trust Institute and consisted of 30-minute online interviews conducted between November 1st and November 28th, 2022. The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer online survey sampled more than 32,000 respondents across 28 countries. A… Continue Reading