James Grimmelmann

3 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | James Grimmelmann |Esther Shein

In April 2024, the U.S. government enacted the “TikTok ban”—a law that gave the wildly popular short-form video service 270 days to divest from Chinese ownership or shut down in the U.S. TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sued to block the law, arguing that it was a blatant violation of the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech. But in January 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the ban and rejected the First Amendment challenge.

Dec 16, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | James Grimmelmann

In 2020 and 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms were awash in dangerous health misinformation. These posts included false claims about the dangers of vaccines, false claims about the health benefits of alternative treatments, and much more. This was a problem for public health—and it was also a content-moderation problem for the platforms.

Aug 15, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | James Grimmelmann |R. Colin Johnson |Jake Widman |Doug Meil

Almost everyone who uses social media agrees that sooner or later you need to use the block button. Maybe it is a spammer who wants you to buy an obscure cryptocurrency, maybe it is an obsessive sports fan who directs obscene tirades at fans of rival teams, or maybe it is a stalker who keeps showing up in your mentions. People have all kinds of good reasons for blocking other users. But in at least some situations, the Supreme Court held this spring in a case called Lindke v.

May 8, 2024 | lawfaremedia.org | James Grimmelmann

Shortly into its brief and controversial career, Google’s Gemini Advanced generative artificial intelligence (AI) system came under fire for producing inaccurate and often offensive images of historical figures. For example, a prompt for “Generate an image of a 1943 German Solidier” (purposely misspelled in the prompt to generate a response) returned a racially diverse set of results—including an Asian woman and a Black man in Nazi uniforms.

Apr 19, 2024 | arxiv.org | A. Feder |James Grimmelmann

[Submitted on 19 Apr 2024 (v1), last revised 18 Jul 2024 (this version, v3)] Title:The Files are in the Computer: On Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AI View a PDF of the paper titled The Files are in the Computer: On Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AI, by A. Feder Cooper and James Grimmelmann View PDF Abstract:The New York Times's copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft alleges OpenAI's GPT models have "memorized" NYT articles. Other lawsuits make similar claims.