curated citations to news sources
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Los Angeles Times: AI ‘hallucinations’ are a growing problem for the legal profession
You’ve probably heard the one about the product that blows up in its creators’ faces when they’re trying to demonstrate how great it is.
Here’s a ripped-from-the-headlines yarn about what happened when a big law firm used an AI bot product developed by Anthropic, its client, to help write an expert’s testimony defending the client.
It didn’t go well. Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, got the title and authors of one paper cited in the expert’s statement wrong, and injected wording errors elsewhere. The errors were incorporated in the statement when it was filed in court in April.
(Los Angeles Times more…)
Damien Charlotin: AI Hallucination Cases
This database tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings.
(Damien Charlotin more…)
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NPR: The White House is deporting people to countries they’re not from. Why?
Ngoc Phan was preparing for her husband to be deported to Vietnam.
…“We’ve accepted it. We planned for it, and we were looking forward to it,” Ngoc Phan said. “And then in the middle of the night, they picked him up and sent him to South Sudan.”
Phan’s husband was one of several men who were first told that they would be sent to South Africa instead of their home countries — which also included Mexico, Burma, Cuba and Laos. Then they were told instead their destination would be South Sudan, a politically unstable country in Africa and one of the poorest in the world.
The administration argues that the men’s home countries won’t take them — and people with criminal records shouldn’t be allowed to stay in the U.S.
(NPR more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – May 31, 2025
“I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition,” Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine told her colleagues on June 1, 1950. “It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”
“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles, and the ones making those attacks were in her own party.
Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, led a faction that had cowed almost all of the Republican Party into silence by accusing their opponents of “communism.” Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state’s Ku Klux Klan.
“Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Anna Gifty: How the “pink tariff” hurts women
Trump’s trade war makes being a woman, and especially a Black woman, much more expensive.
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Bulwark: RFK Jr. May Have Just Ruined Our Best Weapon Against Bird Flu
He just made two bad decisions on vaccines, and he made them in the worst way possible.
(Bulwark more…)
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NY Times: Trump’s Proposed Budget Would Cut a Major Ecology Program
From bee science to understanding the impact of a warming world on plant life, here’s what the Ecosystems Mission Area does.
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Verge: Trump pulls Musk ally’s NASA Administrator nomination
Jared Isaacman’s nomination to lead NASA was reportedly pulled over previous political donations to Democrats.
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Jay Kuo: The Compassion of Strangers
With threats growing each day from this administration, the public response is increasingly pointing toward a path of basic compassion. By this, I mean that people—total strangers, but also fellow residents and neighbors—are taking a stand, including against the injustice, aggression and cruelty of I.C.E.
Witness what happened in San Diego outside the popular Buona Forchetta restaurant in South Park. When I.C.E. showed up in its vans to detain workers—not criminals, but workers—the community did not stand idly by. They began to fill the streets, block vehicles, and were eventually dispersed with flash bangs.
(Jay Kuo more…)
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
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