Animals are really a great analogy, we have a legal construct already for "thing that you own which behaves unpredictably" and the standard is "you are responsible for the damage it causes so make sure you restrain it appropriately."
Nicholson Price
@nicholson.bsky.social
Law professor, food lover, sci fi & fantasy reader
Volition is irrelevant. If the headline was "vicious dog breaks out of OpenAI office and bites man" there would be no question who was responsible. "But the dog is its own entity making its own choices!" Fuck off, either it's property you own or not, you can't have it both ways.
Colin@colin-fraser.net · 2w agoI think if you meaningfully punish OpenAI & co for all of these cyberattacks then they will stop doing them. Whether or not you want to anthropomorphize the agents, you gotta just land there.
Michigan Law #MorningRead "Uncorrected." By Professor @nicholson.bsky.social and Janet Freilich in the Boston University Law Review. www.bu.edu/bulawreview/...
Michigan Law #EveningRead Can Laws Be Flexible? Rethinking Legislation for Innovation By Professor @nicholson.bsky.social et al. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Can Laws Be Flexible? Rethinking Legislation for Innovation - npj Digital Medicine
Agile legislation adapts principles from agile software development to lawmaking, emphasizing iteration, multi-stakeholder feedback, and embedded revision. We outline this learning-oriented governance...
nature.com
Michigan Law #EveningRead "Factors for Patient Trust and Acceptance of Medical Artificial Intelligence" By Professor @nicholson.bsky.social et al. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Factors for Patient Trust and Acceptance of Medical Artificial Intelligence
This survey study examines the associations of patient trust in and choice of medical scenarios involving artificial intelligence with receiving information on governance mechanisms, clinician presenc...
jamanetwork.com
Michigan Law #EveningRead: "Who regulates the physical and informational risks of scientific research?" Read Professor @nicholson.bsky.social's piece in @jotwell.bsky.social: Strings Attached: Science Regulation by Science Funders bit.ly/4iz4o8a
Delighted to (re)discover the word "struthious," meaning "of or related to an ostrich" (i.e., willfully blind, head in the sand). "Struthious conduct." How splendid!
Whoa. WHOA. Le Creuset Star Trek collection?? That is not a combination I ever expected to see, and it is DELIGHTFUL. Happy Star Trek Day! #TNG4Eva #StarTrek blog.trekcore.com/2026/09/star...
Le Creuset Cookware Announces New LE CREUSET x STAR TREK Collaboration for 60th Anniversary
The first big announcement for STAR TREK’s 60th anniversary week is here — a new collaboration with luxury cookware company Le Creuset to send your kitchen to the final frontier
blog.trekcore.com
The most absolutely massive flex from the state fair exhibit. This quilt is made of 40 years of prize ribbons from various categories at the New Mexico State Fair won by Carol St. Clair Johnson. She also won a prize for this quilt.
Update: the dialect map quiz thing going around is a cheap knockoff of the good one, which is here: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk (Published 2024)
What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.
nytimes.com
In a time of intense demands on journals and reviewers, I was stunned to find that I was one of *eight* peer reviewers on a short piece for Discover AI. Anyone else have odd reviewer experiences with them? Certainly does not incline me to review there again. #academia
Oh wow, I feel very old and out of touch. I am moderately aware of 2 of these influencers. New worlds!
dame@dame.is · last mo.it’s that time of year again, Rolling Stone released their list of the top 25 content creators, which is actually a test of how old and out of touch you are… the lower your score, the more out of touch i’ve heard of 11 out of 25
This paper finds that frontier AI models correctly format Bluebook citations only 42.6% of the time on average. The best results come from combining AI with a deterministic rule engine rather than relying on the model alone. spkl.io/633287Pymg #LegalTech #AI
People who don’t know the difference between ‘entomology’ and ‘etymology’ bug us in ways we cannot put into words.
New paper! Governing medical AI is really tough if you can't observe what it's doing or how clinicians interact w/ it! Katie Goodman, Flo Doo, Charles Binkley & I call for better standards for recording AI; preprint up at @jacrjournal.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #AI #medicine
Capturing the Clinician-Artificial Intelligence Interaction: A Missing Prerequisite for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
Check access to the full text by signing in through your organization.
sciencedirect.com
Timeless humour! A 2,000 year-old Roman souvenir pen with a joke inscription roughly equivalent to: “I went to Rome and all I got you was this cheap pen!" 😂 Dated circa 70 AD, this iron stylus pen was recovered in London during excavations by MOLA. 📷 Juan Jose Fuldain/MOLA #Archaeology
![The photo by Juan Jose Fuldain for MOLA shows four images of the same Roman iron stylus (pen) one below the other, with knib to the left. The stylus is octagonal in shape, with a dot-punched inscription along its length on four alternate sides. The stylus is 132 mm long and 5 mm thick, and the letters are circa 2 mm high. The four images of the pen show the four lines of inscribed text (highlighted) which read:
'ab urbe v[e]n[i] munus tibi gratum adf (e)ro acul[eat]um ut habe[a]s memor[ia]m nostra(m)
rogo si fortuna darlelt quo possem
largius ut longa via ceu sacculus est (v)acuus'
Translated as
I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me.
I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able (to give) as generously as the way is long (and) as my purse is empty.'
This inscription is generally interpreted by scholars as a humorous, tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment by the giver of the cheapness of the gift.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:j56ydp325adovobhwpkzc6sp/bafkreiflmumn37zldrqn4gepyqs55kamhvatkkpepk5tq56rqq4pssxb64)
First time I've seen a court issue sanctions for prompt injection in a brief. Pro se plaintiff tries prompt injection (here, white text in tiny font) because he thinks the judge will just use some LLM to read the papers and write a ruling. Judge sees through the ruse.
civilinquiry.jud.ct.gov
It’s that time again, friends. Time to share the greatest eclipse explainer ever.
Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 3y ago🌓🌎🌞 <-- lunar eclipse 🌎🌓🌞 <-- solar eclipse 🌎🌞🌗 <-- apocalypse
me: [sobbing] England, you can't just call everything a pudding J. J. Thomson: [points at atom] pudding
watched the odyssey last night. film ruined by everyone speaking english instead of ancient greek.
They literally called the mentor character "mentor". Low effort. Sad
The writing is lazy too, a guy named Odysseus goes on an “odyssey”?! Get the fuck out of here.
Do you like fast-paced, fun sci-fi that will make you laugh and think? @scalzi.com has a Humble Bundle up—22 books for $18. I'd buy it except I already have all of them. Highly recommend. www.humblebundle.com/books/john-s... #scifi
Humble Book Bundle: The John Scalzi Collection: Old Man's War & More by TOR Books
Discover your new favorite author with this bundle of books from sci-fi humorist John Scalzi! Pay what you want and support World Central Kitchen!
humblebundle.com
Does Not Rhyme -through -cough -though -rough -bough Does Rhyme -pony -bologna
New from me today in @statnews.com: why the Trump admin's attempt to politicize science grantmaking could not only hurt US science, but also make it harder to tackle pressing risks such as the biosecurity risks posed by AI www.statnews.com/2026/07/21/o...
How a controversial rule could hurt the NIH’s ability to manage risk
The proposed rule could “weaken the NIH’s benign influence over research risks,” writes Doni Bloomfield.
statnews.com