A conference today in Albany will discuss the rights and responsibilities of the press and the legal system at a time when artificial intelligence is gaining prominence in everyday life.
Experts representing the media, courts, and legal profession are set to focus on AI at Albany Law School.
The “Fair Trial/Free Press Conference: Artificial Intelligence, Social Media, and the Rule of Law” runs from 2 to 4.
Panelists will consider the legal, political, and ethical issues that arise after an AI-generated reenactment of a confrontation between public officials goes viral on social media.
Chel Miller is program director at the Government Law Center at Albany Law.
“In this hypothetical, two lawmakers do get into an actual confrontation,” Miller said. “And as a reminder, this is a fictional scenario that our team came up with. So in this scenario, there is an actual physical confrontation that takes place between two lawmakers, and one of whom is taken into custody as a result. The AI generated reenactment is created in this scenario by an upstart tabloid covering events at the capitol, who has started to explore, you know, the possibility of using AI to generate content for their social media and their publication. So in this scenario, it’s a fake video, essentially, that is created by AI based on witness descriptions of an actual event.”
In the mock-up, the video is shared on social media without a disclaimer. Panelists will consider the social media platforms’ (and their users’) responsibility, and the implications for a criminal proceeding where one of the lawmakers ends up being charged with a crime.
Michael Grygiel, First Amendment lawyer in Greenberg Traurig’s Albany office, says when you have entertainment as well as news organizations now beginning to rely on AI to generate content, it raises a host of developing legal issues.
“Some of the interesting issues arise among copyright, can be framed as copyright infringements,” said Grygiel. “There have been celebrities who have objected to the use of artificially intelligence generated use of their voices and images. So that is one area that is certainly going to play out large in the future. Others include what is the legal standard that governs the use of content by news organization, news organizations generated by artificial intelligence models that turns out to be false or erroneous and defamatory? How are those claims going to be adjudicated? What legal standards apply to govern those claims? And that’s really all up in the air at this point.”
Retired Associate Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Leslie Stein works at Albany Law. She says law typically lags behind technology.
“The academy, the schools, are all trying to figure out, how do we prevent the misuse of AI. I think that there are so many issues that will arise in law, how judges decide cases, how evidence is received, and how it’s admitted, and how it’s viewed and and what kind of evidence is permissible, and you know, and how we check for how we verify the veracity and the you know, and that it’s true, as opposed to false or fake, is really going to be a challenge for judges, for the courts,” Stein said.
The panel will be moderated by WAMC commentator Rex Smith and retired Court of Appeals judge Al Rosenblatt.
