Year archives: 2023

AI has social consequences, but who pays the price? Tech companies’ problem with ‘ethical debt’

As a technology ethics educator and researcher, Carey Fiesler has thought about AI systems amplifying harmful biases and stereotypes, students using AI deceptively, privacy concerns, people being fooled by misinformation, and labor exploitation. Fiesler characterizes this not at technical debt but as accruing ethical debt. Just as technical debt can result from limited testing during the development process, ethical debt results from not considering possible negative consequences or societal harms. And with ethical debt in particular, the people who incur it are rarely the people who pay for it in the end.

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Subjects: AI, Cyberlaw, Education, Ethics, Human Rights, KM, Legal Ethics, Technology Trends

What are passkeys? A cybersecurity researcher explains how you can use your phone to make passwords a thing of the past

Passkeys are digital credentials stored on your phone or computer and are analogous to physical keys. You access your passkey by signing in to your device using a personal identification number (PIN), swipe pattern or biometrics like fingerprint or face recognition. You set your online accounts to trust your phone or computer. To break into your accounts, a hacker would need to physically possess your device and have the means to sign in to it. Dr. Sayonnha Mandal, cybersecurity researcher, believes that passkeys not only provide faster, easier and more secure sign-ins, they minimize human error in password security and authorization steps. You don’t need to remember passwords for every account and don’t need to use two-factor authentication.

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Subjects: Cybersecurity, Privacy

Presenter’s Guide Series Part IV: The Power of Asking Questions

In the fourth article in his series on presentations, Jerry Lawson advises us on creating compelling presentations. He advises that if the audience is not understood, not engaged, not brought into the conversation, the session usually dies on the vine. Asking the audience questions is one way to improve your training sessions.

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Subjects: Communication Skills, KM, Law Firm Marketing, Legal Profession

In the post-AI legal world, what will lawyers do?

Jordan Furlong writes the legal profession is about to go through what manufacturing already has. In the next few years, legally trained generative AI will replace lawyer labour on a scale we’ve never seen before. An enormous amount of lawyer activity consists of researching, analyzing, writing, developing arguments, critiquing counter-claims, and drafting responses. A machine has now come along that does most of these things, much faster than we do. Today, the machine needs lawyers to carefully review its efforts. Within two years, I doubt it will.

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Subjects: AI, Communication Skills, KM, Legal Marketing, Legal Profession, Legal Research, Technology Trends, United States Law

The Survey Is Dead; Long Live the Survey: Can ChatGPT Replace Traditional Research Surveys?

Iantha Haight writes that her library recently hosted a guest speaker, David Wingate, a professor in BYU’s computer science department who does research on large language models, for a faculty lunch and learn. The entire presentation was fascinating, but the most intriguing part for me and many of the law faculty in attendance was the idea that generative AI systems will become so good they will be able to replace human subjects in answering research surveys. How? Generative neural networks trained on huge amounts of data—terabytes and even petabytes—ingest enough information about people that they can answer survey questions as if they were members of the survey population.

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Subjects: AI, KM, Law Librarians, Legal Technology, Librarian Resources, Library Software & Technology, Reference Resources, Reference Services, Surveys

Bees can learn, remember, think and make decisions – here’s a look at how they navigate the world

Stephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees, and an adjunct professor with the departments of Entomology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. He draws on his experience studying bees for almost 50 years to explore how these creatures perceive the world and their amazing abilities to navigate, learn, communicate and remember. Here’s some of what I’ve learned.

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Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 20, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Artificial Intelligence: Key Practices to Help Ensure Accountability in Federal Use; Don’t get scammed by fake ChatGPT apps: Here’s what to look out for; Apple Employees Forbidden From Using ChatGPT; and How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and Why You Should.

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Subjects: AI, Big Data, Civil Liberties, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, KM, Legal Research, Legislative, Privacy, Search Engines

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 13, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Neighborhood Watch Out; The A.I.-PR Industrial Complex: Artificial intelligence hype is impressively meaningless; Some Google Drive files may land in the new Spam folder soon; and Your voice could be your biggest vulnerability – AI technology is fueling a rise in online voice scams.

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Subjects: AI, Copyright, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Financial System, Privacy

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 7, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: You Can’t Trust Your Browser’s ‘Lock’ to Tell You a Website Is Safe; So long passwords, thanks for all the phish; Amazon Clinic patients must sign away some privacy rights under HIPAA; and Apple and Google Collaborate on Anti-Stalker Tech.

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Subjects: AI, Communications, Criminal Law, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Commerce, Health, KM, Privacy, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Media

LLRX April 2023 Issue

Articles and Columns for April 2023 Whistleblowers Are the Conscience of Society, Yet Suffer Gravely For Trying to Hold the Rich and Powerful Accountable For Their Sins – Lawyer, activist, author, and whistleblower Ashley Gjovik states: “I blew the whistle and was met with an experience so destructive that I did not have the words …

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Subjects: KM
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