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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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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
This was a great collaboration with you @amandareillyinnz.bsky.social. AI will do as it’s trained. If that is to squeeze more profit from workers at the cost of their health, it will. But if we train it to benefit the people whose life experiences make it work, then we will have AI for good.
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Reposted by Josh Fairfield
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 · 16/05/2025
This is going to end exactly like the google “glassholes” debacle. The crazy part is that we accept a degree of surveillance from smartphones in our own pockets that we would never accept from a surveillance device on someone else’s face.
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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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Reposted by Josh Fairfield
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
"How could this happen?" Say the people who trained the AI to make this happen. The deniability is the point.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
Gives new and bleak meaning to "dehumanizing", doesn't it.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
It's not worth it. The damage to people is real and the system won't even create the savings they're training the AI to try to find.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
4/4 ...then it will find every opportunity to eliminate the benefit, even where it is wrong. AI hallucinates. When the hidden optimization goal is reducing costs, AI hallucinates that people are abusing the system when they are not.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
3/4 What's going wrong? The answer is hidden optimization goals. If an AI is told to make sure everyone who is eligible for a benefit gets it, it will do that. If it is told to kick everyone off of a benefit that it can, it will do that. If an AI has the hidden optimization goal of reducing costs...
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
2/4 And it worked out badly in India, on pretty much the same facts. Eligible people were kicked out without necessary benefits. www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...
amnesty.org
India/Global: New technologies in automated social protection systems can threaten human rights
Governments must ensure automated social protection systems are fit for purpose and do not prevent people eligible for welfare from receiving it, Amnesty International said today as it published a tec...
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
1/4 This has worked out very badly for the UK, when they tried to hand over deciding who gets benefits or who should be sanctioned to AI. AI refused needed benefits to thousands of people who had no recourse in some cases, and showed bias in others. Example: www.theguardian.com/society/2024...
theguardian.com
Revealed: bias found in AI system used to detect UK benefits fraud
Exclusive: Age, disability, marital status and nationality influence decisions to investigate claims, prompting fears of ‘hurt first, fix later’ approach
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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
5/5 Watch this space. Massive personalized A/B testing against our social intuitions is a major surface of attack. If AI plateaus, the "gains" will be increasingly on the side of degradation of human defenses, not upgrades in AI performance.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
4/5 AI doesn’t care how it reaches a result. It can improve its performance at evading, or degrade human capacity to detect. This is as true in targeted behavioral advertising as it is in the Turing Test, as it is in astroturfing political debate.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
3/5 If our social interface – our need to listen to others and mirror their thoughts and intentions – can make us smarter, it can also make us dumber. Think of all of the problems of problematic large group behavior.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
2/5 2/5 This works because humans don’t think alone – we are designed to think in groups, studies have confirmed for years. That’s why our “myside bias” doesn’t cost us long term. Everyone argues for what they think is best, and the group rates that.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
1/5 The study showed that the major upgrades to passing the test were not upgrades in intelligence, but persona attributes that hacked the interrogators’ social interface.
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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 · 03/04/2025
For VPN use, in addition to #GDPR is the question of a country's laws on mandatory data retention and how that impacts server logs.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
The more I think about this, the worse it gets. Respecting your customers' stated privacy preferences isn't a feature you can just "discontinue." It's a feature of a fully-bought-and-paid-for product that was just removed. Imagine if brakes on a truck were treated this way.
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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 · 30/03/2025
Either it was when I got it, which was a while back, or it was a onetime purchase low enough I forgot it. Which, at $5.99, is worth years of use. As you say below, too, it's good for keeping bots and spammers out.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
You're right. It's now a one-time payment, which was apparently low enough ($5.99 USD right now) that I forgot it existed. No recurring payments, it's worked well for me for years.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
The standard Threema app is free and fully featured!
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
14/14 No app can make up for bad habits. Signal is a tool, but privacy comes down to how you engineer it. Okay. What security habits do you swear by?
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
13/14 Consider switching to services headquartered in countries that have strong privacy laws and respect for the rule of law. Sweden, Germany, or Switzerland are good choices.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
12/14 Deleting texts doesn't mean they can't be recovered, at least until you download (not stream) a lot of shows, which might help over time to overwrite those deleted-but-not-entirely-gone messages. You knew binge watching was good for something.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
11/14 Encryption does very little to keep you anonymous when Signal identifies you by your phone number. Use a nickname so nobody adds you to classified chats by mistake, perhaps, but don't expect people not to be able to find out who you are.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
10/14 Before sending, be aware of your keyboard. Signal politely asks keyboards not to log messages. Many keyboards impolitely ignore the request. Get an open source reputable keyboard to reduce this risk.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
9/14 Ready for a win? You're probably fine against interception in transit. That's what end-to-end encryption means. It's most powerful when the message is in the air. Your risk is before sending or after receiving.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
8/14 Check your linked devices list when you read this sentence to make sure nothing has been linked without your knowledge.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
7/14 Don’t link Signal across multiple devices that you aren’t in sole control of. Intelligence agencies love that loophole for a reason.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
6/14 Update your system regularly. That's where exploits get patched.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
5/14 Since your system and its encryption are your primary source of protection of received messages, make sure your system pass phrase is as long as possible, and uses as few actual dictionary words as possible.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
But remember, losing physical possession of a powered down phone still means you’re owned. It may take a million-dollar zero-day exploit to get in, but it's just a matter of budget and determination. Still, if your attacker doesn't have a colossally huge budget, maybe you win here.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
4/14 Turn your phone completely off if you're worried about losing possession. It helps as a technical matter and may help as a legal matter. Some jurisdictions permit a party to refuse to unlock a phone with a passphrase. But you can be forced to unlock with biometrics.
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Josh Fairfield @joshfairfield.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
3/14 Signal relies on system encryption, not container encryption, for received messages. If someone else has access to your device, they have access to Signal. Consider an alternative encrypted messaging app such as Threema for encryption in addition to system.
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