Nilay Patel

CNN has a rare inside look at the Supreme Court deliberations that led to the (bad!) Texas and Florida social media regulations being put on hold and sent back to the lower courts to figure out how they would affect other kinds of websites and services. It almost went the other way, until Samuel Alito went too far in his first draft and Amy Coney Barrett flipped, eventually joining the 6-3 majority opinion.

[Alito] questioned whether any of the platforms’ content-moderation could be considered “expressive” activity under the First Amendment.

Barrett, a crucial vote as the case played out, believed some choices regarding content indeed reflected editorial judgments protected by the First Amendment. She became persuaded by Kagan, but she also wanted to draw lines between the varying types of algorithms platforms use.

The ruling is already having an impact on other moderation cases.

The US Copyright Office spent a good chunk of last year soliciting comments from the public about AI and intellectual property, and it’s out today with the first part of the resulting report. The takeaway? Digital replicas and deepfakes of people are a big problem, and the patchwork of existing IP laws won’t be enough to solve it.

Based on all of this input, we have concluded that a new law is needed. The speed, precision, and scale of AI-created digital replicas calls for prompt federal action. Without a robust nationwide remedy, their unauthorized publication and distribution threaten substantial harm not only in the entertainment and political arenas, but also for private individuals. 

Notable timing here: we just saw the No Fakes Act reintroduced in the Senate earlier today.

Here’s Guide to Computing, a loving collection of photos of giant computers from 1945 to 1990 by James Ball, who publishes as Docubyte. Sounds like a book is in the works; sign me up.

One thing about having the idea of AI clones attending meetings in Zoom presented to you for the first time in a conversation with the CEO on your podcast is that other people get to react to said idea in a much funnier way, like Angela Collier does here.

Wired editor-in-chief (and notable Verge alum!) Katie Drummond flags this incredible stack of sourcing and disclosure notes in Semafor’s piece about Perplexity’s new revenue-sharing agreements with publishers. Well done, all around.

Splice got itself in some trouble a couple weeks ago when it issued a YouTube copyright strike against Krystle Delgado, a music attorney who showed one of the company’s sample licenses on screen. Splice wised up and retracted the strike last week, CEO Kakul Srivastava tell me. “We fundamentally support the rights of creators to express themselves – even if we disagree,” she wrote in an email to Delgado.

For her part, Delgado confirmed that the strike was indeed retracted by YouTube, and tells me that she wishes she could have spoken to to Srivastava directly before Splice’s lawyers escalated the situation.

As always, I will remind everyone that copyright law is the only functional speech regulation on the internet, and using it to chill speech or block criticism never tends to go well!

Can’t think of the last time I opened an app to an apology for how buggy the app is!