Legal Issues - The Art of the Prank

August 8, 2025

Is a Picture Still Worth a Thousand Words?

Learn to spot fake AI photos while you still can:

“Digital Forensics Expert Provides Helpful Tips for Spotting AI Generated Images,” by Lori Dorn, Laughing Squid, July 22, 2025.

“During a truly informative TED talk, Professor Hany Farid of UC Berkeley shared his expertise as a digital forensics expert to give helpful tips in spotting whether or not an image was AI generated.

Digital forensics expert Hany Farid explains how he helps journalists, courts and governments find structural errors in AI-generated images, offering four practical tips everyday individuals can use when facing the internet’s war on reality.

Farid explains how AI does not understand the physics, geometry and other real world issues, so it will inevitably make mistakes in perspective, an anomaly that can be tracked. One such error is that of the vanishing point, in which parallel lines, such as railroad tracks, will seem to converge the further it is away from the eye.

Read the whole article here.

February 3, 2024

Backlash to Forward Motion

Sometimes a red balloon is an egg…

Data poisoning: how artists are sabotaging AI to take revenge on image generators, by T.J. Thomson, The Conversation, December 17, 2023

Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to a text-to-image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image.

You enter the prompt: “red balloon against a blue sky” but the generator returns an image of an egg instead. You try again but this time, the generator shows an image of a watermelon.

What’s going on?

The generator you’re using may have been “poisoned”.

Read the whole article here.

October 23, 2022December 15, 2023

Who’s Your Daddy? Supreme Court Sits in Judgement on Fair Use

Fair Use is at the Supreme Court with potentially huge transformative consequences to artists on both sides of the issue.

The Supreme Court meets Andy Warhol, Prince and a case that could threaten creativity, Nina Totenberg, NPR’s All Things Considered, October 12, 2022

You know all those famous Andy Warhol silk screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor and lots of other glitterati? Now one of the most famous of these, the Prince series, is at the heart of a case the Supreme Court will examine… And it is a case of enormous importance to all manner of artists. Read the whole article here.

October 23, 2022December 15, 2023

And the message is… VOTE!

Loud and clear from artist Karen Fiorito…

Billboard Art in Phoenix Is Tackling Abortion Bans, by Lynn Trimble. Hyperallergic, October 2, 2022

The Grand Avenue Billboard Project enables artists like Karen Fiorito to publicly express their political views.

PHOENIX — On a billboard that looms over the Grand Avenue arts district, artist Karen Fiorito has installed artworks decrying abortion bans and obstructionist politicians. One side of the billboard features the five conservative Supreme Court Justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, and the other highlights 11 politicians who’ve opposed legislation aimed at improving education, health care, voting rights, and more. Read the whole article here.

November 1, 2019December 15, 2023

AI in the Courtroom: Joey Skaggs’ Solomon Project Revisited

In 1995, Joey Skaggs launched his Solomon Project hoax. Solomon (so he said) was a distributed program running on a set of super computers that would deliberate on the facts and evidence of a case and deliver a definitive verdict, eliminating the need for juries and radically reducing the role of judges. CNN fell for the Solomon Project hook, line and sinker. Reality may finally be catching up with Skaggs. h/t Felipe

Robot judges ‘will pass sentence with no human bias’ in AI courts
by Michael Moran
Daily Star
October 19, 2019

Increasing use of AI in legal system points the way to an all-robot courtroom

It’s likely that most people locked in our jails believe that with a better lawyer, a more lenient judge or a more understanding jury things might have been very different for them.

Human error, they will say, is to blame for them being banged up.

But can the human element be removed? Law firms are already using computer algorithms to perform background research other tasks traditionally performed by human staff. And that’s just the beginning.

As computer researchers get closer to creating true Artificial Intelligence, it’s predicted to eliminate most paralegal and legal research positions within the next decade.

The next step inevitably involves artificial intelligences aiding, or even completely replacing lawyers. And if we have robot lawyers, why not automated judges and juries too? Why not a fully solid-state legal system?

Read the rest of this article here »