Lawyer Ex Machina #59
AI
Thomson Reuters has announced it will be adding generative AI features to Westlaw Precision on November 15th
From the Wall Street Journal [$]: "When AI Denies Your Loan Application, Should You Be Able to Appeal to a Human?"
Pras Michel's motion for a new trial, based largely on claims that his attorney relied too much on an AI product to write his closing, will be subject to an evidentiary hearing [Law360 ($) | Vulture ($)]
Deepfake nudes of teenage girls being passed around by teenage boys is having convulsive effects [WSJ ($) | Washington Post ($) | Ars Technica | CNN]
From WaPo/Election Law Blog: "Meta will require political campaigns to disclose their use of artificial intelligence in political ads, a new policy that could shape how the new technology is used in the 2024 elections"
A new study finds that law students using ChatGPT to complete legal tasks significantly decreased the time students needed to write legal materials, but the quality of the work was not significantly improved [Reuters | SSRN Paper]
How often do GenAI chatbots make stuff up? A New York Times [$] article attempts to establish benchmarks for summarization
Vanderbilt Law School is launching an AI Legal Lab "to explore how artificial intelligence intersects with the delivery of legal services and access to justice"
Blockchain
A couple of reactions to Sam Bankman-Fried's conviction for fraud, and how much of it may also touch and concern other crypto entities [The Nation | NY Times ($)]
Paypal announced it has received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding its new stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar
Data Privacy
A group of parents in New Jersey have launched a class action for against the state of New Jersey for "keeping blood samples taken from newborn babies for 23 years, all without parents’ knowledge or consent," with no specified restrictions on its downstream use [ New Jersey Monitor | Bloomberg Law ($) | Wired ($)]
What Wired calls a "Frankenstein bill" of patchwork privacy provisions to reform FISA has been introduced in both houses of Congress, the Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2023
A new report was published this week on "Data Brokers and the Sale of Data on U.S. Military Personnel: Risks to Privacy, Safety, and National Security" [Politico | MIT Tech Review ($)]
A 9th Circuit panel affirmed the dismissal of a class action suit in Washington State against automakers for recording and intercepting text messages and call logs from drivers' phones when connected with car infotainment systems [The Record | Docket]
Miscellaneous
The fallout from the suspension of G.M.'s Cruise driverless taxi fleet in San Francisco continues:
CNN - Cruise recalls all of its self driving cars to fix their programming
NY Times [$] - G.M.’s Cruise Moved Fast in the Driverless Race. It Got Ugly.
Gary Marcus - Rethinking driverless cars
The Intercept [$] - Cruise Knew Its Self-Driving Cars Had Problems Recognizing Children — And Kept Them On The Streets