May 30, 2025

DIGITAL FRONTIER OF JUSTICE: Judge rejects claim AI chatbots protected by First Amendment.

A federal judge has decided that First Amendment protections don’t shield an artificial intelligence company from a lawsuit accusing the firm and its founders of creating chatbots that figured prominently in an Orlando teen’s suicide.

Judge Anne C. Conway of the Middle District of Florida denied several motions by defendants Character Technologies and founders Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III. Setzer killed himself with a gun in February of last year after interacting for months with Character.AI chatbots imitating fictitious characters from the Game of Thrones franchise, according to the lawsuit filed by Sewell’s mother, Megan Garcia.

“… Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by (Large Language Models, or LLMs, trained in engaging in open dialog with online users) are speech,” Conway said in her May 21 opinion. “… The court is not prepared to hold that Character.AI’s output is speech.”

Skynet might have something to say about that.

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green 11

TANNED, RESTED, AND TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Responds To Book: “I’m Mentally Incompetent, I Can’t Walk, And I Could Beat The Hell Outta Both Of Them.”

REPORTER: What has this been like for your family? Obviously, this is also an emotional time. This is the ten-year anniversary of your son Beau’s passing. You received this diagnosis just two weeks before that.

BIDEN: Well, we’re all optimistic about the diagnosis. Matter of fact, one of the leading surgeons in the world is working with me. And he had diagnosed the same exact thing 32 years ago. He’s alive and well and doing very well. So we’re optimistic. We’re optimistic.

REPORTER: There’s also been a lot of discussion recently about your mental and physical capabilities while you were in office.

BIDEN: You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk, and I can beat the hell out of both of them.

REPORTER: Do you want to reply to any of those reports, and also to the fact that there are some Democrats who are now questioning whether you should have run for reelection in the first place?

BIDEN: Why didn’t they run against me then? Because I’d have beaten them.

REPORTER: Do you have any regrets?

BIDEN: No, I don’t have any regrets. Look, there’s a lot going on, and I think we’re in a really difficult moment—not only in American history but in world history. I think we’re in one of those inflection points in history where the decisions we make in the next little bit are going to determine what things look like for the next 20 years. I’ve been talking about that for a long time. And I’m very proud. I’d put my record as president against any president at all. You notice that 12 of the 10 leading presidential historians rated me pretty good up on that list—and the guy I ran against, I rated him last. So, we’ll see.

Biden in 2028! He’s absolutely ready to exploit his opponent’s youth and inexperience!

More seriously, it’s a great moment of projection, as America will be cleaning up the many disasters created during Biden’s tumultuous single term in office.

Also watch the video above for the truly creepy way that Biden gets in a female journalist’s face, despite her not having actually asked a question. I’m sure her hair must smell awesome.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 53

THE CAPITALISTS SOCIALISTS WILL SELL US THE ROPE WITH WHICH WE WILL HANG THEM: How Churchill’s Successor Gave Stalin the MiG.

In the middle of the great fiscal crises that enveloped Britain between the end of Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan, [Clement] Attlee personally authorized two export transactions with the Soviet Union for the sale of jet engines manufactured by Rolls-Royce—specifically, 10 Nene and 10 Derwent engines in May 1946, and a further 15 Nenes and 20 Derwents in March 1947. The transactions were small in scale: The two sales to the USSR earned Rolls-Royce the rather limited sum of £364,000, with the Nene priced at £7,300 and the smaller Derwent at £6,050. The Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust has not provided any comparative information concerning the company’s sales in 1946 and 1947. Nonetheless, it is possible to say that the money could not have been of much significance to Rolls-Royce. As for Britain as a whole, it was a trifle. By comparison, Britain imported grain and flour worth £3,248,000 from the USSR in September 1948 alone.

Since Bevin was comparing Stalin’s regime to the Nazis in January 1947, it was not the case that Attlee’s cabinet was seized with optimistic delusions concerning the nature of the USSR. In fact, already on June 5, 1946, Attlee had adopted Churchill’s phrase, “the Iron Curtain” when speaking of disagreements with the Soviet Union. At the same time, Attlee cynically called on Britain to “try and understand the Russian mind and Russian history” in pursuit of better relations. Remarkably, this attitude toward Russia, practically verbatim, is still common in 2025.

Attlee, at least, would quickly drop the act. In a speech on the occasion of May Day 1948, Attlee called Soviet methods as “ruthless and unscrupulous” as those of the Nazis. But the damage had been done. The 55 British engines, including five improved Nene IIs, were all delivered by November 1947. Attlee’s cabinet had handed over a critically important military technology to a regime that it had compared to the Nazis, in private before deliveries were complete, and in public shortly after the contracts had been fulfilled.

Postwar Soviet jets were made by reverse-engineering British Rolls-Royce jet engines (and as the above article at Tablet goes on to note, mounted inside fuselages whose swept-wings were designed by captured German engineers). The postwar Soviet bomber program was begun by reverse-engineering commandeered American B-29 bombers. And the Soviet A-bomb was created using top secret information smuggled out of the States by communist spies (including the Rosenbergs).

“In October 1985, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visited France where he met with French President François Mitterrand. In candid conversations, Gorbachev told Mitterrand that the USSR was a Third World country with nuclear weapons.” A Third World country that made the most of the technology that had fallen into its hands after WWII.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 29

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Don’t Hide Your Drugs in a Cop Car. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, you’ll learn the worst place to hide your drug stash, the worst time to strip down naked and break into your neighbor’s house, and why they ought to call it a people cage instead of a shark cage.”

Posted at 2:19 pm by Stephen Green 3

ABOUT TIME: NASA astronauts Butch and Suni emerge from recovery after long Starliner mission. “Wilmore and Williams, who last year set off for an eight-day Starliner test flight that swelled into a nine-month stay in space, have had to readapt their muscles, sense of balance and other basics of Earth living in a 45-day period standard for astronauts returning from long-term space missions. The astronaut duo have spent at least two hours a day with astronaut strength and reconditioning officials within NASA’s medical unit while juggling an increasing workload with Boeing’s Starliner program, NASA’s space station unit in Houston and agency researchers.”

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 20

CHANGE? DC mayor proposes repeal of sanctuary city law. “The law currently bans local police from working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain illegal immigrants. The sanctuary city status prevents the city from asking about a detained person’s immigration status or releasing them to ICE or from allowing the federal agency to interview a suspect in local custody without a court order.”

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green 32

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Well, Well, Well, Look Who the FBI Is Investigating “The mean streets of Seattle and their Antifa shock troops have caught the eye of the FBI. And it’s about time someone investigated this continuing criminal enterprise on the West Coast, Messed Coast™— especially after this past week’s assault and battery spree on cops and Christians.”

Posted at 1:17 pm by Stephen Green 31

YES.

Posted at 12:50 pm by Glenn Reynolds 61

OH MY: Giant Russian Nuke Info Hack. “Given computer security standards in most organizations, the idea that sensitive information was just sitting on a publicly accessible server for years at a time is entirely too plausible.”

Tons of details at the link.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green 19

STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT:

Shot:

Chaser:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 190

JULIE KELLY CORRECTS THE RECORD:

Posted at 12:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds 65

HMM: Credit default swaps are back in fashion — even if the panic might be overblown. “Credit default swaps are like insurance for investors. Buyers pay a fee to protect themselves in case the borrower — in this case the U.S. government — can’t repay their debt. When the cost of insuring the U.S. debt goes up, it’s a sign that investors are getting nervous.”

Hey, Congress — think this is maybe another indicator you might want to cut some spending?

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green 68

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Sydney Sweeney To Start Selling Soap With Her Own Bathwater Mixed In.

Famous actress Sydney Sweeney joined forces with Dr. Squatch Soap Co. to make her dirty bathwater available for fans across the globe.

The superstar just made soap a little dirty, according to an Instagram post shared Thursday by Dr. Squatch, a personal care product company. Sweeney will dunk herself in bathwater that will be bottled up, turned into beauty soap, and sent to those that want to lather up with this intimate item.

“You kept asking about my bathwater after the @drsquatch ad… so we kept it. Introducing Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss! A very real, very limited-edition soap made with my actual bathwater,” Sweeney wrote May 29 on her official Instagram page.

Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll 203

YUGE:

Posted at 10:20 am by Stephen Green 87