Don’t Feed the Machines
Posts on AI, big tech, and the growing case for not handing either one more of your data, your trust, or your attention than they’ve earned.
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A Few Tools I Actually Use to Stop Feeding the Machine
I’ve spent a lot of recent blog posts on what the AI industry takes without asking — your data, your privacy, your content, your professional expertise, all treated as raw material for someone else’s product. I’ve made the case for regulation. I’ve made the case for lawmakers to slow down. But I’ve gotten a few…
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Machines Need Permits, Too
On July 8, the Sarasota County Commission voted 5-0 to freeze the acceptance or review of data center applications for a year. One of the commissioners stated, “For me, it’s a no. Not now, not ever.” I’ve spent a number of recent blog posts writing about the AI industry and what it takes from us…
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Why I’ve Stopped Feeding the Machines
If you’ve been a regular reader here, you’ve probably noticed my posting cadence has changed. Where I used to publish multiple times a month, it’s now sporadic at best—mostly thoughts on AI and what it’s doing to the world we used to know. This is a deliberate choice, and I feel that maybe I owe…
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Lawyers, We’re Having the Wrong Conversation About AI
Picture this: You’re at a bar function, someone mentions they’re using AI for legal research, and immediately three people jump in with: “Oh, you have to check the citations!”… “It hallucinates!”… “I heard it gave someone completely fake cases!” Yes, we know. That was 2023. Don’t get me wrong—those were valid concerns when ChatGPT first…
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Gone in 60 Milliseconds
Does Anyone Care that AI Bots are Stealing Everyone’s Data? As artificial intelligence continues to reshape our digital landscape, website owners, content creators, and businesses are grappling with a fundamental question: Who controls how your online content is used to train AI systems? The answer, unfortunately, is more complicated than you might expect. The Current…
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How to Disable eBay’s Hidden AI Data Collection Setting
I’ve been using eBay for years. With 132 million active users, chances are that you are an eBay user, as well. Recently, while adjusting some of the payment preferences in my account, I stumbled upon a surprising setting buried deep in my account settings. It’s a toggle that provides “consent” for eBay to use your…
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Lawyers, Don’t Fear the Reaper
A.I. may be new and scary, but the legal profession should embrace it, not bogeyman it. One of the benefits of being a licensed Florida attorney is that, every month, without fail, I receive a nice, crisp copy of The Florida Bar News. This month was like no other as I recently received the September…
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Behind Glass Eyes: A.I. Facial Recognition and the Evolved Horror of Eyewitness Error
The recent boom in the use of Artificial Intelligence models such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft Co-Pilot (and a future offering from Apple on the horizon) shows that society is increasingly willing to embrace and rely upon artificial intelligence to do a great number of tasks for us. Certainly, artificial intelligence can and does…