Become Unvęrifiable

[Bloomberg Law @BLaw]

An en banc Ninth Circuit panel appeared willing to scrap a long-criticized copyright infringement test used to determine whether works are substantially similar Tuesday, spending considerable time asking what should replace it. https://t.co/2MocnSi15T

[Bloomberg Law @BLaw]

Apple found itself on the losing end of the largest patent infringement verdict in US history, a landmark event that at least one IP observer said reflects mounting frustration with Big Tech that could usher in similar mammoth awards. https://t.co/p8YYDQk0Ep

[Library of Congress @librarycongress]

NEWS: Martha C. Nussbaum receives the 2026 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. https://t.co/U6DSNzCkCK

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

The tasks students are given during the year—homework, essays, tests—are not the point of the instruction. These types of work have historically been a means to help build and improve upon skills, but now large language models and the long shadow of the job market have disrupted a centuries-old educational paradigm, according to Dan Rockmore, a mathematics and computer science professor at Dartmouth. “The stick is broken and the carrot has lost its taste.” His solution? Focus on how to create classrooms that make the process feel worth doing for its own sake, something akin to replicating the feeling and fulfillment that comes from exercising. Read more: https://t.co/iJl7IPaowP

[Scientific American @sciam]

Scientists are among AI’s heaviest users of any profession. Nearly half use it daily. That hasn’t produced a wave of new medicines. A new report from Google, Google DeepMind and MIT digs into why.
https://t.co/BKjl2QwKwc

[banteg @banteg]

>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful

>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg

>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality

>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking

>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets

>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future

>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"

>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now

>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner

>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value

>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god

>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully

>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved

>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical

>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical

>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic

>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign

>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important

>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples

>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me

>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting

>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous

>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field

>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels

>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends

>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment

>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back

>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc

>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere

>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review

>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed

>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly

>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better

>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"

>motte has entered the chat

>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren

>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy

>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored

>tell myself this is impartial altruism

>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"

>silence

>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval

>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"

>stare into cosmic light cone

>10^50 people staring back

>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions

>realize I have invented the perfect constituency

>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me

[Adrian Vermeule @Vermeullarmine]

Would an AI-generated statutory text even count as “law”? @thenewdigest has hosted a multi-faceted debate on the topic, which no longer seems to be merely a hypothetical problem. For all the entries in the debate, see here:

https://t.co/Lt7QSO5FMV

[Mixmag @Mixmag]

Suno has admitted to taking music from YouTube to train its AI models in court filings

https://t.co/dPUHJWovJw

[Scientific American @sciam]

Beauty feels intensely private, and, at the same time, we keep discovering that we collectively share it. That contradiction is one of the longstanding puzzles in “neuroaesthetics”—the science of how the brain responds to art and beauty
https://t.co/wPVo1dM1tP

[CNN @CNN]

Joel Sartore photographs like he's running out of time. Twenty years into his monumental project, the National Geographic Photo Ark, he's taken portraits of over 18,000 species around the world. At least one of those species has since become extinct — but he holds out hope that his photography can help save others. https://t.co/8qw3fivdAG

[Rob Freund @RobertFreundLaw]

Copyright infringement by retweet?

Yesterday, a California court allowed such a claim to proceed against Tesla, surviving a motion to dismiss.

A drone footage video was uploaded to X by Sawyer Merritt, without authorization from guy who filmed it. Clear copyright problem there.

The next day, Elon Musk retweeted it. The plaintiff contacted Tesla about the unauthorized use later that day.

The plaintiff alleged that Tesla (via Elon) knew about the underlying copyright problem when Elon reposted.

"Merritt included in the caption of his original post: 'video via WC Drone Productions,' suggesting that Merritt had uploaded a third party's Video."

"This is sufficient to give rise to the plausible inference that Tesla knew that Merritt published a third party's Video without authorization, and thus knew that Merritt's X post constituted copyright infringement."

"Accordingly, the Court concludes that Plaintiff has successfully alleged a claim for contributory copyright infringement for Tesla's repost of Merritt's X post."

[Eriq Gardner ✍️ @eriqgardner]

The Trump Administration files a statement of interest in the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times against OpenAI, taking the position that it’s fair use to train an LLM on copyrighted text.

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

AI prose is distinguishable by word and punctuation choice as well as sentence and paragraph structure. But its hallmarks are not what you might expect. Read our full investigation https://t.co/U7FskEthnO

[CNN @CNN]

A federal appeals court has ruled that states can regulate prediction markets like gambling, dealing a major blow to the booming industry. https://t.co/W5vsbSNA5p

[CNN Breaking News @cnnbrk]

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, famous for covering her colorful installation designs with polka dots, has died at 97. https://t.co/9CbatIeyfk

[Become Unvęrifiable @technolobsterIP]

Fun fact: Justice Neil Gorsuch mentions Erykah Badu in his book “Over Ruled.” This implies that he’s a really big fan.

[Scientific American @sciam]

A new study shows that each neuron can do multiple computations at once thanks to hundreds of sprawling branches
https://t.co/4U3QO8eeXJ

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

Like a heat-seeking missile, AI can lock on to the most obscure provisions of the law—and create carnage. The impact on Britain’s employment tribunals illustrates a phenomenon emerging everywhere https://t.co/Bbo0xdgKvJ

[Orin Kerr @OrinKerr]

NEW: Here, finally, is my new draft article on the Supreme Court's Chatrie decision. I think the ruling is tremendously important to Fourth Amendment law—and here's why.
https://t.co/VdmxLRIdUp