OpenAI says “Temporary Chat” doesn’t store your chats. A federal court says they must. So either they’re violating a court order… Or they’re gaslighting users. Privacy theater is not privacy. #privacytheater #fairfieldonprivacy #ailaw #openai

The predictions for entry-level hiring in almost every industry are dire...except law. AI misfires and misjudges legal relevance. Entry-level legal roles now mean verifying, cross-checking, and stress-testing AI’s work. AI is going to make these jobs essential. #AIandLaw #LegalTech #FutureOfWork

ProPublica just exposed the VA using AI to cancel contracts based on the prompt: “munchable.” Yes, really. -$3k services flagged as $34m waste -No legal standards applied -AI doesn't reason, it predicts, then it scales In theory, AI can do the job. In practice, it doesn’t know what the job is.

Law doesn’t move forward without brainstorming; every case has something new. New analysis shows the use of AI cuts the uniqueness and originality of ideas by up to 94% in brainstorming. In law, that’s not a bug, that’s a fatal flaw. #futureoflaw #creativitycrisis #legaleducation #AIandlaw

AI handling lawsuits sounds efficient, until your case doesn’t fit the script. Legal disputes need humans who can adapt, not glitch. Sure, a human might get things wrong, but a human won’t forget they're in traffic court and start spouting off about white genocide. #ailaw

In depth: 'World’s first AI law firm' targets high street practices

Garfield Law, a pioneering firm providing legal services through AI, has been approved by the SRA. The founders, a City lawyer and a quantum physicist, are targeting LiPs and high street firms

tinyurl.com

In Ultra Processed People, there’s this line: “Most UPF is not food, Chris. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.” This is AI-generated “speech.” It’s not speech. It’s a processed word product. Know what we’re doing about UPF additives right now? Regulating them. tinyurl.com/y2fv6966

Are Character AI’s chatbots protected speech? One court isn’t sure

A judge is “not prepared” to say companion chatbots should receive First Amendment protection.

theverge.com

A decade with no state AI regulation. That’s not a delay; it’s a decision. A decision allowing deepfakes. Fraud scaling at pace. Your data, your face, your work as free fuel. This should be the loudest conversation in the country. Why isn’t it? bit.ly/4kpQ53o #AIRegulation #ReconciliationBill

GOP sneaks decade-long AI regulation ban into spending bill

Sweeping provision would halt all local oversight of AI by US states.

bit.ly

Meta is working on facial recognition glasses!?! www.404media.co/well-well-we... This is so dangerous. I am currently working on a paper (with @joshfairfield.bsky.social ) about the threat to freedom of association new surveillance technologies pose, and the threat just keeps getting worse.

Well, Well, Well: Meta to Add Facial Recognition To Glasses After All

Meta previously lost its shit at 404 Media when we reported that someone had paired facial recognition tech with the company's smart glasses. Now Meta is building the invasive technology itself.

404media.co

EU: Ad tracking has no legal basis. US: Track, target, aggregate, then hand it to advertisers and the state. This was never about consent for #SurveillanceCapitalism www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis

Landmark court decision against “TCF” consent pop ups on 80% of the internet

iccl.ie

If I’d done sketchy things on the blockchain, I’d be nervous right now. Pseudonymity is eroding. With AI and just a terabyte hard drive, tracing transactions is suddenly within reach, not just for govts, but for the public. Who’s digging into this? Let’s talk. #BlockchainForensics #Chainanalysis

In 2015, Erik Luna and I wrote about Digital Innocence; how social media data was being used to convict people, but rarely to exonerate them. It’s 2025. If courts let AI help prosecute, they must also allow it to help defend. We need to talk about *Algorithmic Innocence*. #DigitalEvidence

Again with Signal. In case any one person in particular missed this and could benefit from it: bsky.app/profile/josh... #OPSECFail #SignalApp #Privacy #encryptedmessaging

Josh Fairfield@joshfairfield.bsky.social · last yr.

From the “shouldn't have to say this, but here we are” dept: Here is how to use Signal (more) safely. Or, less recklessly. Thread ⬇️ #signal #privacy #encryptedmessaging #fairfieldexplains

Great quote from @profhilaryallen.bsky.social on blockchain regulation (or, really, lack of meaningful rules of the road): "Unicorns with a side of regulatory arbitrage"

Essay I wrote with @joshfairfield.bsky.social for a excellent union (the PSA) project on AI for good has now been published. www.psa.org.nz/resources/pr.... I enjoyed being on a panel to launch this today & I am quite pleased they kept the Butlerian Jihad reference in (at p 8)

Using AI to cut benefits, as the Social Services Amendment Bill proposed in New Zealand appears to permit, is a huge mistake. 👇Thread 👇. #NZPol #AI #EthicalAI #StopRoboDebt www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Ministry of Social Development to use basic AI to regrant benefits

Opponents fear a potential law change will create a loophole allowing AI to cut benefits and impose sanctions, which the ministry denies.

rnz.co.nz

Overheard: "Someone's belief that a job can be effectively replaced by AI is directly proportional to the distance of that person from the job." Developers think the CEO's job could be automated. CEOs think the sales jobs can be automated. The real answer is AI must facilitate human innovation.

The 👇 recent study showing an LLM “passed” the Turing Test wasn’t the first. But it does show the real problems of scaled social engineering: AI that does not get smarter, but makes us dumber to get past our defenses. (Brief) Thread ⬇️. interestingengineering.com/culture/gpt-...

GPT 4.5 achieves 73% Turing Test success, blurring human-AI lines

Asked to adopt a ‘human-like persona,’ GPT‑4.5 and Meta’s Llama‑3.1‑405B outperformed human participants in a three-party Turing scenario.

interestingengineering.com

March 28, Amazon has removed the ability to tell Alexa to keep voice recordings local. This is terrible design: not needed for AI to get better, not needed to provide the service. The only real reason for it is to listen to things homeowners don't want Alexa to hear. The surveillance is the point.

From the “shouldn't have to say this, but here we are” dept: Here is how to use Signal (more) safely. Or, less recklessly. Thread ⬇️ #signal #privacy #encryptedmessaging #fairfieldexplains

#LegalTech #Ireland is coming up on 7 April - the schedule is now available at www.universityofgalway.ie/business-pub... and there is still time to register!

When AI eats its own tail, it damages the environment. My new piece, Clean Data: Recursion as Pollution in Environmental AI (scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlufac/881/) is out from Oxford University Press, with great editors @joshgellers.bsky.social and @spillteori.bsky.social. #OUP #AIethics #newoil

23andMe as a functioning company was a privacy disaster. 23andMe as a bankrupt, for sale company is a fucking nightmare www.404media.co/dna-of-15-mi...

DNA of 15 Million People for Sale in 23andMe Bankruptcy

There is no way to know what a buyer will want to do with the reams of genetic information it has collected. Customers, meanwhile, still have no way to change their underlying genetic data.

404media.co

Runaway Technology (2021) by Joshua A. T. Fairfield "Offers a powerful argument for the centrality of law to our efforts to tackle a range of contemporary threats through organization and cooperation." cup.org/3EcygVM

Runaway Technology

Cambridge Core - Law and technology, science, communication - Runaway Technology

cup.org

The New Harvard Law: “Under controlled conditions of data selection, training, validation, and structured prompting, the AI will do as it damn well pleases.”

"There is no meaningful distinction between 'machine speech' and 'human speech.'" Bold paper by Prof. Jess Miers. I disagree. Consider a review. If it is AI generated it doesn't tell you about lived experience with the product. Or a love letter. The AI doesn't love you. #internetlawwip25

#internetlawwip25 Great group of thinkers, great ideas. Conversation in community is the only way we will find solutions. People flew here from all over the world to talk in person: they know in their bones that online conversation has been flooded with non-human voices.

AI will always break its own guardrails, unless we understand how its training processes cause it to evolve around constraints. The RoboPair study makes me think cybersecurity is in for a hard decade. Every AI successfully hacked!

I've given talks on reasonable AI regulation on both coasts over the past 48 hours and some of the responses are really telling. East coast: "The market will save us!" West coast: "Technology will save us!" There is a reasonable path between evangelism and luddism, between tech and markets.

Some people not only have something important to say, but say it compulsively clearly. Ada Palmer at #iWORD: the "old fridge" problem means we compare old and broken systems to new and shiny ones. We need to design for when systems inevitably break.

Nick Couldry's book, The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can't, is out today. This is a sane and necessary read for anyone who wants to see what's gone wrong with the global conversation.