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Josh Fairfield

@joshfairfield.bsky.social
264 followers 123 following 64 posts

Legal scholar, tech law nerd, reluctant futurist AI, crypto, digital property & community Prof @ W&L | Author | Testifies sometimes | Consultant Book 3 on the way. Author alignment: Lawful Thoughtful joshfairfield.com

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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
OpenAI says “Temporary Chat” doesn’t store your chats. A federal court says they must. So either they’re violating a court order… Or they’re gaslighting users. Privacy theater is not privacy. #privacytheater #fairfieldonprivacy #ailaw #openai
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
The predictions for entry-level hiring in almost every industry are dire...except law. AI misfires and misjudges legal relevance. Entry-level legal roles now mean verifying, cross-checking, and stress-testing AI’s work. AI is going to make these jobs essential. #AIandLaw #LegalTech #FutureOfWork
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 07/06/2025
ProPublica just exposed the VA using AI to cancel contracts based on the prompt: “munchable.” Yes, really. -$3k services flagged as $34m waste -No legal standards applied -AI doesn't reason, it predicts, then it scales In theory, AI can do the job. In practice, it doesn’t know what the job is.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
Law doesn’t move forward without brainstorming; every case has something new. New analysis shows the use of AI cuts the uniqueness and originality of ideas by up to 94% in brainstorming. In law, that’s not a bug, that’s a fatal flaw. #futureoflaw #creativitycrisis #legaleducation #AIandlaw
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
AI handling lawsuits sounds efficient, until your case doesn’t fit the script. Legal disputes need humans who can adapt, not glitch. Sure, a human might get things wrong, but a human won’t forget they're in traffic court and start spouting off about white genocide. #ailaw
tinyurl.com
In depth: 'World’s first AI law firm' targets high street practices
Garfield Law, a pioneering firm providing legal services through AI, has been approved by the SRA. The founders, a City lawyer and a quantum physicist, are targeting LiPs and high street firms
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
In Ultra Processed People, there’s this line: “Most UPF is not food, Chris. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.” This is AI-generated “speech.” It’s not speech. It’s a processed word product. Know what we’re doing about UPF additives right now? Regulating them. tinyurl.com/y2fv6966
theverge.com
Are Character AI’s chatbots protected speech? One court isn’t sure
A judge is “not prepared” to say companion chatbots should receive First Amendment protection.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
A decade with no state AI regulation. That’s not a delay; it’s a decision. A decision allowing deepfakes. Fraud scaling at pace. Your data, your face, your work as free fuel. This should be the loudest conversation in the country. Why isn’t it? bit.ly/4kpQ53o #AIRegulation #ReconciliationBill
bit.ly
GOP sneaks decade-long AI regulation ban into spending bill
Sweeping provision would halt all local oversight of AI by US states.
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Amanda Reilly @amandareillyinnz.bsky.social · 16/05/2025
Meta is working on facial recognition glasses!?! www.404media.co/well-well-we... This is so dangerous. I am currently working on a paper (with @joshfairfield.bsky.social ) about the threat to freedom of association new surveillance technologies pose, and the threat just keeps getting worse.
404media.co
Well, Well, Well: Meta to Add Facial Recognition To Glasses After All
Meta previously lost its shit at 404 Media when we reported that someone had paired facial recognition tech with the company's smart glasses. Now Meta is building the invasive technology itself.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
EU: Ad tracking has no legal basis. US: Track, target, aggregate, then hand it to advertisers and the state. This was never about consent for #SurveillanceCapitalism www.iccl.ie/digital-data...
iccl.ie
EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis
Landmark court decision against “TCF” consent pop ups on 80% of the internet
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
If I’d done sketchy things on the blockchain, I’d be nervous right now. Pseudonymity is eroding. With AI and just a terabyte hard drive, tracing transactions is suddenly within reach, not just for govts, but for the public. Who’s digging into this? Let’s talk. #BlockchainForensics #Chainanalysis
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
In 2015, Erik Luna and I wrote about Digital Innocence; how social media data was being used to convict people, but rarely to exonerate them. It’s 2025. If courts let AI help prosecute, they must also allow it to help defend. We need to talk about *Algorithmic Innocence*. #DigitalEvidence
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
Again with Signal. In case any one person in particular missed this and could benefit from it: bsky.app/profile/josh... #OPSECFail #SignalApp #Privacy #encryptedmessaging
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
Great quote from @profhilaryallen.bsky.social on blockchain regulation (or, really, lack of meaningful rules of the road): "Unicorns with a side of regulatory arbitrage"
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Amanda Reilly @amandareillyinnz.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
Essay I wrote with @joshfairfield.bsky.social for a excellent union (the PSA) project on AI for good has now been published. www.psa.org.nz/resources/pr.... I enjoyed being on a panel to launch this today & I am quite pleased they kept the Butlerian Jihad reference in (at p 8)
psa.org.nz
Progressive Thinking
Bringing together some of Aotearoa New Zealand's brightest minds to share their perspective on pressing issues.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
Using AI to cut benefits, as the Social Services Amendment Bill proposed in New Zealand appears to permit, is a huge mistake. 👇Thread 👇. #NZPol #AI #EthicalAI #StopRoboDebt www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...
rnz.co.nz
Ministry of Social Development to use basic AI to regrant benefits
Opponents fear a potential law change will create a loophole allowing AI to cut benefits and impose sanctions, which the ministry denies.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
Overheard: "Someone's belief that a job can be effectively replaced by AI is directly proportional to the distance of that person from the job." Developers think the CEO's job could be automated. CEOs think the sales jobs can be automated. The real answer is AI must facilitate human innovation.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
The 👇 recent study showing an LLM “passed” the Turing Test wasn’t the first. But it does show the real problems of scaled social engineering: AI that does not get smarter, but makes us dumber to get past our defenses. (Brief) Thread ⬇️. interestingengineering.com/culture/gpt-...
interestingengineering.com
GPT 4.5 achieves 73% Turing Test success, blurring human-AI lines
Asked to adopt a ‘human-like persona,’ GPT‑4.5 and Meta’s Llama‑3.1‑405B outperformed human participants in a three-party Turing scenario.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
March 28, Amazon has removed the ability to tell Alexa to keep voice recordings local. This is terrible design: not needed for AI to get better, not needed to provide the service. The only real reason for it is to listen to things homeowners don't want Alexa to hear. The surveillance is the point.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
From the “shouldn't have to say this, but here we are” dept: Here is how to use Signal (more) safely. Or, less recklessly. Thread ⬇️ #signal #privacy #encryptedmessaging #fairfieldexplains
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Rónán Kennedy @ronanmkennedy.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
#LegalTech #Ireland is coming up on 7 April - the schedule is now available at www.universityofgalway.ie/business-pub... and there is still time to register!
universityofgalway.instructure.com
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
When AI eats its own tail, it damages the environment. My new piece, Clean Data: Recursion as Pollution in Environmental AI (scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlufac/881/) is out from Oxford University Press, with great editors @joshgellers.bsky.social and @spillteori.bsky.social. #OUP #AIethics #newoil
scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu
Clean Data: Recursion as Pollution in Environmental AI
If “data is the new oil,” then corruption in the data used to train artificial intelligence (AI) constitutes a new form of pollution. Environmental AI has traditionally been discussed in terms of its ...
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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
23andMe as a functioning company was a privacy disaster. 23andMe as a bankrupt, for sale company is a fucking nightmare www.404media.co/dna-of-15-mi...
404media.co
DNA of 15 Million People for Sale in 23andMe Bankruptcy
There is no way to know what a buyer will want to do with the reams of genetic information it has collected. Customers, meanwhile, still have no way to change their underlying genetic data.
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Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR @cambup-polsci.cambridge.org · 27/01/2025
Runaway Technology (2021) by Joshua A. T. Fairfield "Offers a powerful argument for the centrality of law to our efforts to tackle a range of contemporary threats through organization and cooperation." cup.org/3EcygVM
cup.org
Runaway Technology
Cambridge Core - Law and technology, science, communication - Runaway Technology
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
The New Harvard Law: “Under controlled conditions of data selection, training, validation, and structured prompting, the AI will do as it damn well pleases.”
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
"There is no meaningful distinction between 'machine speech' and 'human speech.'" Bold paper by Prof. Jess Miers. I disagree. Consider a review. If it is AI generated it doesn't tell you about lived experience with the product. Or a love letter. The AI doesn't love you. #internetlawwip25
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
#internetlawwip25 Great group of thinkers, great ideas. Conversation in community is the only way we will find solutions. People flew here from all over the world to talk in person: they know in their bones that online conversation has been flooded with non-human voices.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
AI will always break its own guardrails, unless we understand how its training processes cause it to evolve around constraints. The RoboPair study makes me think cybersecurity is in for a hard decade. Every AI successfully hacked!
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
I've given talks on reasonable AI regulation on both coasts over the past 48 hours and some of the responses are really telling. East coast: "The market will save us!" West coast: "Technology will save us!" There is a reasonable path between evangelism and luddism, between tech and markets.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Some people not only have something important to say, but say it compulsively clearly. Ada Palmer at #iWORD: the "old fridge" problem means we compare old and broken systems to new and shiny ones. We need to design for when systems inevitably break.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Nick Couldry's book, The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can't, is out today. This is a sane and necessary read for anyone who wants to see what's gone wrong with the global conversation.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Amazing conference on the future of privacy in the workplace at Victoria University Wellington this past Friday, coorganized with Amanda Reilly. How to escape the hell of bossware. tinyurl.com/Conceptualiz...
tinyurl.com
Wellington School of Business and Government on LinkedIn: The Conceptualising and Enforcing Privacy for Workers workshop ran on…
The Conceptualising and Enforcing Privacy for Workers workshop ran on Friday 6 December in Rutherford House. The purpose of this workshop was to map the way…
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Headed to Bruce Schneider's iWord conference on democracy for the next century. The best conference of the year, every year.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Now is when we plan to restore democracy and push back the global democratic recession.
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