Showing posts with label due diligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label due diligence. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Fake Cases, Real Consequences [No digital link as of 10/1/24]; ABA Journal, Oct./Nov. 2024 Issue

 John Roemer, ABA Journal; Fake Cases, Real Consequences [No digital link as of 10/1/24]

"Legal commentator Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA School of Law who tracks AI in litigation, in February reported on the 14th court case he's found in which AI-hallucinated false citations appeared. It was a Missouri Court of Appeals opinion that assessed the offending appellant $10,000 in damages for a frivolous filing.

Hallucinations aren't the only snag, Volokh says. "It's also with the output mischaracterizing the precedents or omitting key context. So one still has to check that output to make sure it's sound, rather than just including it in one's papers.

Echoing Volokh and other experts, ChatGPT itself seems clear-eyed about its limits. When asked about hallucinations in legal research, it replied in part: "Hallucinations in chatbot answers could potentially pose a problem for lawyers if they relied solely on the information provided by the chatbot without verifying its accuracy."

Thursday, September 5, 2024

Intellectual property and data privacy: the hidden risks of AI; Nature, September 4, 2024

Amanda Heidt , Nature; Intellectual property and data privacy: the hidden risks of AI

"Timothée Poisot, a computational ecologist at the University of Montreal in Canada, has made a successful career out of studying the world’s biodiversity. A guiding principle for his research is that it must be useful, Poisot says, as he hopes it will be later this year, when it joins other work being considered at the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Cali, Colombia. “Every piece of science we produce that is looked at by policymakers and stakeholders is both exciting and a little terrifying, since there are real stakes to it,” he says.

But Poisot worries that artificial intelligence (AI) will interfere with the relationship between science and policy in the future. Chatbots such as Microsoft’s Bing, Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT, made by tech firm OpenAI in San Francisco, California, were trained using a corpus of data scraped from the Internet — which probably includes Poisot’s work. But because chatbots don’t often cite the original content in their outputs, authors are stripped of the ability to understand how their work is used and to check the credibility of the AI’s statements. It seems, Poisot says, that unvetted claims produced by chatbots are likely to make their way into consequential meetings such as COP16, where they risk drowning out solid science.

“There’s an expectation that the research and synthesis is being done transparently, but if we start outsourcing those processes to an AI, there’s no way to know who did what and where the information is coming from and who should be credited,” he says...

The technology underlying genAI, which was first developed at public institutions in the 1960s, has now been taken over by private companies, which usually have no incentive to prioritize transparency or open access. As a result, the inner mechanics of genAI chatbots are almost always a black box — a series of algorithms that aren’t fully understood, even by their creators — and attribution of sources is often scrubbed from the output. This makes it nearly impossible to know exactly what has gone into a model’s answer to a prompt. Organizations such as OpenAI have so far asked users to ensure that outputs used in other work do not violate laws, including intellectual-property and copyright regulations, or divulge sensitive information, such as a person’s location, gender, age, ethnicity or contact information. Studies have shown that genAI tools might do both1,2."

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Elon Musk Apparently Didn’t Bother To Make Basic Preparations Ahead Of His Chaotic, Comical Rebranding Of Twitter As ‘X’ Despite His Decades-Long Obsession With The Letter; UPROXX, July 25, 2023

Mike Redmond, UPROXX ; Elon Musk Apparently Didn’t Bother To Make Basic Preparations Ahead Of His Chaotic, Comical Rebranding Of Twitter As ‘X’ Despite His Decades-Long Obsession With The Letter

"To the surprise of no one, there was a whole lot of diligence left on the table.

Despite Musk having a decades-long obsession with the name X, to the point that it led to his ouster at PayPal, it appears that nobody at Twitter thought to check if anyone had already registered the X trademark. Turns out, Musk’s rival Mark Zuckerberg is already sitting on the name along with 900 other copyright registrations (including Microsoft). Whoops."

Monday, April 23, 2018

What Harley Davidson’s $19.2M Throttling Of Sunfrog REALLY Means… And It’s Not The Money; Above The Law, April 23, 2018

Tom Kulik, Above The Law; What Harley Davidson’s $19.2M Throttling Of Sunfrog REALLY Means… And It’s Not The Money

When it comes to intellectual property rights, companies ignoring their impact do so at their own risk.


"The point here is that rapid growth and success makes being proactive even more essential to the business.   Rather than follow-through with significant steps to stop the printing of infringing products, something got lost in the process and Sunfrog simply couldn’t get its arms around the scope of the problem.  In effect, Sunfrog’s failure to effectively address this problem  made Sunfrog a counterfeiter — it permitted the printing of infringing designs on T-shirts sold through its website, making Sunfrog a nice profit in the process. Of course, this was never Sunfrog’s intent — it set out to create a highly successful platform for printing custom T-shirts online, and in fact, succeeded in doing so.  That said, it also underestimated the extent to which a sizable part of its business model required intellectual property oversight — an oversight that is now costing them in both monetary and reputation damages.

Ultimately, the Sunfrog case is highly instructive on a number of levels, but the failure to appreciate the scope and extent of intellectual property oversight by Sunfrog is telling.  Whether your company or client is a startup or an already successful going concern, the use of intellectual property can never be taken for granted. When it comes to intellectual property rights, companies ignoring their impact do so at their own risk.  The good news is that warning signs usually present themselves at some point.  The bad news is that such signs can be ignored or otherwise under-appreciated.  That is the real point here, and a risk that your company (or client) shouldn’t take — just ask Sunfrog."