What Does Tucker Carlson's Sudden Schism With Fox News Mean?
Plus: Should committed libertarians be opposed to pro-natalist policies?
Libel
The Fox/Dominion Settlement Highlights the Importance of Discovery in Proving 'Actual Malice'
Critics argue that excessively strict pleading standards prevent plaintiffs with meritorious defamation claims from obtaining the evidence they need to support them.
When Are Slurs and Vulgarities Defamation?
The Mississippi Court of Appeals splits 5-4 on the subject.
Plaintiff, Who Had Published an Article Describing Herself as Escort, Sues Newspaper for Calling Her an Escort
Plaintiff "asserts that her published work and other accounts describing life as an escort were part of an effort to build a career in writing and were entirely fictional. As for the websites and other internet advertisements cited by defendants, she claims that they were produced for the purpose of satisfying Medium’s 'fact-checking' requirements and possibly promoting a future fictional web series on the topic."
Communications Can Be Defamatory Even If Readers Realize There's a Considerable Risk of Error
And AI programs' "tendency [to, among other things, produce untruthful content] can be particularly harmful as models become increasingly convincing and believable, leading to overreliance on them by users. Counterintuitively, hallucinations can become more dangerous as models become more truthful, as users build trust in the model when it provides truthful information in areas where they have some familiarity."
Don Blankenship Loses Libel Lawsuit Against Donald Trump, Jr., Who Called Blankenship a "Felon"
Coal baron and later Senate candidate Blankenship had been convicted of a misdemeanor, and served a year in prison for it; a federal judge has concluded that Blankenship hadn't introduced enough evidence that Trump, Jr. knew that he had erred in calling Blankenship a "felon."
Court Rejects Idea Theft / "Hot News" Claim by Occasional Fox Guest Against Fox
Bonus: Calling someone a "nut" isn't libel.
Large Libel Models: An AI Company's Noting That Its Output "May [Be] Erroneous]" Doesn't Preclude Libel Liability
[An excerpt from my forthcoming article on "Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Outputs."]
Trump's Anti–First Amendment Skylarking Is DeSantis' Anti–First Amendment Action
The former president wanted to "open up" defamation laws. The governor of Florida is about to try.
No Temporary Restraining Order Against Critic of Israeli Muslim Institution,
who allegedly accused it of being an agent of the Israeli government and "refer[red] to individuals associated with the Academy as pigs and use[d] porcine imagery to insult those individuals."
Correction re: ChatGPT-4 Erroneously Reporting Supposed Crimes and Misconduct, Complete with Made-Up Quotes?
My Friday post erroneously stated that I got the bogus results from ChatGPT-4; it turns out they were from ChatGPT-3.5—but ChatGPT-4 does also yield similarly made-up results.
Large Libel Models: ChatGPT-3.5 Erroneously Reporting Supposed Felony Pleas, Complete with Made-Up Media Quotes?
[UPDATE: This article originally said this what ChatGPT-4 doing this, which was my error. But, as I note below in an UPDATE, ChatGPT-4 also erroneously reports supposed criminal convictions and sentences, complete with made-up quotes.]
Carroll v. Trump Libel Suit: Trump's Access Hollywood Tape Admissible, as Is
other women's testimony about Trump's alleged past sexual assaults.
Libel Statute of Limitations for Blog Posts Starts When They're Published, Not When Plaintiff Discovers Them
All the more reason to frequently Google your own name!
"I Was Just Kidding!" Assertion Can't Justify Dismissal of Libel Case
Def Noodles v. Keemstar.
