News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
Everything you say is true, but what is the alternative? I don’t think people are advocating a return to in-class…
The discussion here assumes an institutional context where returning to supervised in-person assessment is at least theoretically feasible, a reasonable…
Cyber security professional here -reliably determining when a computational artifact (file, etc.) was created is *hard*. This is sorta why…
Agreed with the other commentator. It is extremely unlikely that Pangram’s success is due to its cheating by reading metadata.
I see this question as a bit naïve. There is metadata on every document created by a modern word processor…
There’s a simple way to test. Open a pre-2022 essay and copy-and-paste it into a new file.
At the risk of self-advertising:… You claim “AI is unusual in degree, not in kind” and “It is not clear…
Who exactly has standing to complain of defamation here? What am I missing? (I haven't read the complaints, I should add, I am just going off the news story.)
Whether or not the defamation causes of action are mispleaded, the complaints also include counts of tortious interference with business relations. The complaints themselves are on Cooley’s website at http://www.cooley.edu/newsevents/_docs/2011_07_14_Summons_and_Complaint_startpage.pdf and http://www.cooley.edu/newsevents/_docs/2011_07_014_Summons_and_Complaint_startpage.pdf
A corporation can be a defamation plaintiff. See, e.g., Restatement (Second) of Torts section 561.
BL COMMENT: Thanks, I didn’t realize the Cooley Law School was incorporated.
The problem is going to be damages. Since this is a business, the tort is injurious falsehood (restatement’s name for it). Though an individual in this case could claim this is defamation per se, and thereby get presumed damages, a business needs to establish pecuniary damages. Even if enrollment is down at Cooley, it would be difficult to show a link between the activity of these bloggers and the reduced enrollment.
Cosign Beau. I don’t have data on injurious falsehood claiming but defamation is exceedingly tough for plaintiffs. The recurring paradigm is win at trial (if the judge lets the plaintiff over the “special damages” hurdle and doesn’t dismiss), lose on appeal. Cooley has next to zero chance of collecting a penny. It’s probably hoping for some kind of non-monetary victory. It won’t get that either.
Don’t they really want an injunction? Bloggers do not have money; the firm might – but it is really difficult to calculate damages in a case like this.
Leave a Reply