MIT Technology Review [unpaywalled]: “Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set. Now they have a new way… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Legal Research
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 27, 2024
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 27, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the… Continue Reading
What Makes a Pirate? Updating U.S. Piracy Law to Address an Age-Old Scourge
LawFare – While U.S. piracy law has largely stagnated since 1820, international law has evolved. Now it’s time to catch up. The “golden age” of piracy may have ended in the 17th century, but the scourge continues to the present day from the Red and Somali seas to the Gulf of Guinea, wreaking havoc on… Continue Reading
When scientific citations go rogue: Uncovering ‘sneaked references’
Via LLRX – When scientific citations go rogue: Uncovering ‘sneaked references’ – Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in… Continue Reading
Breaking Up the Giants of Harm
Breaking Up the Giants of Harm. To protect democracy and have a resilient economy, we must tackle corporate power. Again. “Governments and economic regulators have, since the 1980s, turned a blind eye to a handful of giant companies steadily gaining chokeholds in global markets. Banking, agriculture, digital technology, publishing, music, pharmaceuticals and more are dominated… Continue Reading
Microsoft researchers are teaching AI to read spreadsheets
Spreadsheet LLM – Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models: “Spreadsheets are characterized by their extensive two-dimensional grids, flexible layouts, and varied formatting options, which pose significant challenges for large language models (LLMs). In response, we introduce SpreadsheetLLM, pioneering an efficient encoding method designed to unleash and optimize LLMs’ powerful understanding and reasoning capability on spreadsheets.… Continue Reading
About the Insurrection Act
Brennan Center – Via Reddit – “I’m Joseph Nunn, counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Ask me anything about reforming the Insurrection Act, an outdated law that gives the president near limitless power to use the U.S. military as a domestic police force. The Insurrection Act is… Continue Reading
News homepages, archived
Data is Plural: “Since launching in March 2022, homepages.news has archived millions of screenshots, performance audits, robots.txt files, accessibility trees, and hyperlink lists from the homepages of 1,100+ news sites. The open-source project, run by journalist Ben Welsh, provides bulk data for each of those assets. The screenshots themselves are stored on the Internet Archive;… Continue Reading
Google’s Exclusive Reddit Access
404 Media -“We’ve written a lot over the past year about how bad Google Search is getting, but it’s still incredibly useful for searching Reddit. Add “Reddit” to the end of any search query, and chances are you’ll find a useful thread. Due to a $60 million deal that allows Google to scrape Reddit for… Continue Reading
Human rights scores
Data is Plural: “The CIRIGHTS project aims “to create numerical measures for every internationally recognized human right for all countries of the world.” The team has developed a detailed guide to scoring each government’s record on dozens of such rights, such as freedom of religion, women’s political rights, freedom from extrajudicial killings, the right to… Continue Reading
Political Violence and the 2024 Presidential Election
This webinar is part of the 2024 U.S. Election Webinar series sponsored by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. As the United States prepares to head to the polls in November, this series will convene scholars and practitioners to discuss down-ballot issues, election security, voter trends, and more. This event is online only,… Continue Reading
AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage
MIT Technology Review: “AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined. New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades… Continue Reading
