USA Facts: “Swing states, also known as battleground states, are states that could “swing” to either Democratic or Republican candidates depending on the election. Because of their potential to be won by either candidate, political parties often spend a disproportionate amount of time and campaign resources on winning these states. While there is no universal definition of what identifies a swing state, they are characterized by having small vote margins and that different political parties win over time. Since 1992, 30 states have voted for the candidate of the opposite party from the previous election at least once. And 26 states were won by less than three points in any presidential election since 1992…”
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Category Archives: Copyright
Unlocking AI for All: The Case for Public Data Banks
LawFare: “The data relied on by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other artificial intelligence (AI) developers is not readily available to other AI labs. Google and Meta relied, in part, on data gathered from their own products to train and fine-tune their models. OpenAI used tactics to acquire data that now would not work or may… Continue Reading
Inside the $621 Million Legal Battle for the ‘Soul of the Internet’
RollingStone via MSN [no paywall]: “Major record labels have sued the online library Internet Archive over thousands of old recordings, raising the question: Who owns the past?Before founding the Internet Archive, Kahle worked as a computer scientist, making major contributions to personal computing and the early internet during the Eighties and Nineties. With the Archive,… Continue Reading
U.S. Court Orders LibGen to Pay $30m to Publishers, Issues Broad Injunction
TorrentFreak: “Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon granted the default judgment without any changes. The anonymous LibGen defendants are responsible for willful copyright infringement and their activities should be stopped. “Plaintiffs have been irreparably harmed as a result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct and will continue to be irreparably harmed should Defendants be allowed to… Continue Reading
67% of Top News Sites Block Access by AI
NewsGuard’s Reality Check Special Report: “In tech lingo, “garbage in, garbage out” means that if bad data goes into a system, expect bad results. The same holds true for the accuracy of AI chatbots. A NewsGuard analysis found that 67 percent of the news websites rated as top quality by NewsGuard block access to their… Continue Reading
“Model collapse” threatens to kill progress on generative AIs
Big Think: When AI eats its own product, it gets sick. Key Takeaways Generative AI exploded in popularity when OpenAI released ChatGPT. A paper published in Nature looked at what happens when AI is trained on “synthetic data,” or content created by an AI rather than humans. Flaws in the synthetic data led to even… Continue Reading
Generative AI, Plagiarism, and Copyright Infringement in Legal Documents
Cyphert, Amy, Generative AI, Plagiarism, and Copyright Infringement in Legal Documents (May 10, 2024). WVU College of Law Research Paper No. 2024-14, Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, Vol. 25 (2024), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4938701 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4938701 – “Lawyers are increasingly using generative AI in their legal practice, especially for drafting motions and other… Continue Reading
Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America’s libraries
MIT Technology Review – “The decision locks libraries into an ecosystem that is not in readers’ interests. Congress must act. I was raised in the 1980s and ’90s, and for my generation and generations before us, the public library was an equalizing force in every town, helping anyone move toward the American dream. In Chantilly,… Continue Reading
New AI standards group wants to make data scraping opt-in
Ars Technica: “The first wave of major generative AI tools largely were trained on “publicly available” data—basically, anything and everything that could be scraped from the Internet. Now, sources of training data are increasingly restricting access and pushing for licensing agreements. With the hunt for additional data sources intensifying, new licensing startups have emerged to… Continue Reading
The Internet Archive Loses Its Appeal of a Major Copyright Case
Wired unpaywalled: “The Internet Archive has lost a major legal battle [The case is Hachette Book Group Inc. v. Internet Archive, 2d Cir., No. 23-1260, 9/4/24.]—in a decision that could have a significant impact on the future of internet history. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital… Continue Reading
When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself
The New York Times – As A.I.-generated data becomes harder to detect, it’s increasingly likely to be ingested by future A.I., leading to worse results. ” The internet is becoming awash in words and images generated by artificial intelligence. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, wrote in February that the company generated about 100 billion words… Continue Reading
U.S. Copyright Office Announces Updated Webinar on Copyright Essentials: Myths Explained
“The U.S. Copyright Office invites you to register to attend the upcoming online webinar, Copyright Essentials: Myths Explained, on September 18, 2024, at 1:00 p.m. eastern time. There is a lot of misleading information out there about copyright. On September 18, 2024, the U.S. Copyright Office will discuss what is and is not true when… Continue Reading
