LEGAL TIDBIT:
On March 14, 1900, President William McKinley signed the Gold Standard Act into law. Upon enactment, silver was no longer redeemable for US bills, and the US Treasury was required to redeem paper currency for 25.8 grains of 90% pure gold per dollar. This would last until August 1971, when President Nixon abandoned the gold standard and decoupled US currency from any commodity-backing.
This Week:
- TikTok finds itself in a major crossroads
- EU legislators have passed the world's first major AI regulations
- Judges Discuss AI In The Court
📱 SOCIAL MEDIA
The Clock Is Tick-Tocking On ByteDance
It's the ban heard 'round the world: the US House of Representatives passed a bill this week calling for the ban of mega-popular social media app TikTok unless it's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the platform.
The House passed the bill with bipartisan support and a vote tally of 5-to-1 in favor. Even President Biden signaled he would sign the bill if it clears the Senate. If so, TikTok will become the first app in history to be outright banned in the US. But can the bill pass the upper chamber?
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has noted that he would need to first discuss a bill with "relevant committee chairs" before knowing its path to a vote, writes the Associated Press.
“We are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok — a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company ByteDance remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party,” Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a joint statement with Senator Marco Rubio, the ranking Republican of the committee.
But not everyone is on-board. “We don’t have only a TikTok problem—we have a Big Tech privacy problem,” Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts wrote on X. “From Meta to Amazon to Discord, US-owned companies are preying on children & teens for profit. We don’t need to ban TikTok to fix their invasive practices. Passing my COPPA 2.0 is the answer.”
And the ACLU has come out against the ban saying that it would "suppress speech, even if it doesn’t explicitly regulate content," reports The Verge. The ACLA "pointed to a federal court’s ruling in Montana blocking the state’s attempted ban of TikTok to back up its claims that the new House bill is unconstitutional."
The First Amendment
And this free speech argument is especially ripe with two cases currently before the Supreme Court.
As we previously, both Florida and Texas passed laws in their state that effectively prohibited social media platforms from banning users. These laws attempted to enshrine a freedom of speech in what those states' lawmakers consider the public square. But Chief Justice Roberts asked during oral arguments "whether our first concern should be with the state regulating what, you know, we have called the modern public square.”
THE VERDICT:
Silicon Valley seems to be facing an interesting bind: on the one hand, banning TikTok from the US would help companies like Meta and Snap gain more users and potential ad revenue. On the other hand, should the US start going down a road where media platforms can be banned outright and the First Amendment can be weaponized for political gain, we will be entering a fraught new era of the Internet.
🤖 ARITFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Europe Generates AI Restrictions In A World's First
If the United States won't step up, the European Union is happy to do so. That was the message the EU parliament sent this week by enacting the world's first major Artificial Intelligence regulations.
The so-called EU AI Act rates AI technology based on risk level and implements restrictions based on threat level. If a technology is considered "unacceptable", it would be banned by the member states.
As the BBC adds, "The Act also creates provisions to tackle risks posed by the systems underpinning generative AI tools and chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.These would require producers of some so-called general-purpose AI systems, that can be harnessed for a range of tasks, to be transparent about the material used to train their models and to comply with EU copyright law."
The AI act is expected to begin implementation in May after the EU parliament's legislative session, and after "passing after passing final checks and receiving endorsement from the European Council" notes CNBC.
"The European Union now has the world's first hard coded AI law," Patrick Van Eecke, a partner at Cooley, told Reuters. "Other countries and regions are likely to use the AI Act as a blueprint, just as they did with the GDPR."
However, business interests are already voicing concern. "The need for extensive secondary legislation and guidelines raises significant questions about legal certainty and the law's interpretation in practice, which are crucial for investment decisions," said Marcus Beyrer of the lobbying group BusinessEurope. While Marco Pancini, Meta's head of EU affairs, noted: "It is critical we don't lose sight of AI's huge potential to foster European innovation and enable competition, and openness is key here."
And Emma Wright, a partner at law firm Harbottle & Lewis, told CNBC that "considering the pace of change in the technology — as shown with the launch of generative AI last year — a further complication could be that the EU AI Act quickly becomes outdated especially considering the timeframes for implementation.”
Schumer's Push
In the US, meanwhile, no meaningful legislation of AI has taken form. In the fall of 2023, the Biden Administration announced that it was beginning to consider AI regulation. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then personally took it upon himself to push for a bill. "While today’s AI Executive Order is a massive step forward, everyone agrees there is no substitute for Congressional action," Schumer said in October. "Congress must act, must take the next step to build upon, augment, and expand today’s Executive Order by the president, and we must do it through bipartisan legislation."
THE VERDICT:
Pioneering AI regulation may actually be a benefit to the EU rather than a hindrance to innovation. As the expression in US politics says: "As California goes, so goes the nation." The Golden State not only leads tech innovations, but leads their regulation. Could such a counter-intuitive move put Europe at the forefront of AI development?
🤖 ARITFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Judges Rule On AI
“I have no problem at all with AI tools being used to draft a motion or a brief. An AI tool is just that: a tool," said Judge Xavier Rodriguez of the Western District of Texas. Rodriguez was speaking at this week's Sedona Conference and was joined by other judges who sought to defend the use of AI in legal work.
Courts “shouldn’t assume everything about AI is nefarious and not helpful,” Chief Magistrate Judge Helen Adams of the US District Court for the Southern District of Iowa added, notes Bloomberg Law. “I don’t think this is any different than relying on an associate or an intern to draft the brief."
The growing adoption of AI in court documents and even in court itself has been met with skepticism and concern. Last year, New York lawyer Steven Schwartz famously filed a court brief generated by ChatGPT and full of hallucinations—a term for made-up or incorrect information generated by AI.
The judges at the Sedona Conference panel warned against using AI so blindly, and drilled down the point that AI should be used in early drafts and with a heavy dose of verification. Louisiana State Court Judge Scott Schlegel continued his concern over a distinction between generative AI and AI tools more broadly: “I think we do the bar a disservice when we do general orders like this."
Chief Justice Roberts
For his 2023 annual report, Chief Justice John Roberts paid particular attention to the issue of AI in the legal profession. The technology “obviously has great potential to dramatically increase access to key information for lawyers and non-lawyers alike,” Roberts wrote, cites SCOTUSBlog. However, “any use of AI requires caution and humility” because of the risk of “invading privacy interests and dehumanizing the law.”
Writing about the future of the field, Roberts said he predicts "that human judges will be around for a while. But with equal confidence I predict that judicial work — particularly at the trial level — will be significantly affected by AI."
THE VERDICT:
We are still in the early stages not only of AI itself, but of the technology's adoption in the legal profession. As with any technology, it is just a tool, not a replacement or substitute for human work. That being said, the caution mentioned by these judges should be heeded—it's hard to recover your reputation after a gaff like blindly submitting AI documents that were never verified.
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