Hi everyone!
Douglass Mackey, the man who was prosecuted for a meme, has seen his conviction overturned and his case dismissed. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals said—unanimously—that the Biden administration's DOJ had no evidence to back up their accusation that Mackey had conspired to deprive Americans of their voting rights.
The whole thing sounds preposterous because it is. "Mackey argues, inter alia, that the evidence was insufficient to prove that he knowingly agreed to join the charged conspiracy. We agree," the court said. This means that Mackey will not have to serve the 7 months to which he was sentenced over the meme and his full rights will be restored. Mackey has now decided to sue the government.
It all began back in 2016 during the meme wars when anons were sh*t posting Trump memes to their hearts' content. One of those memes showed a black lady instructing Hillary supporters to vote by text. It was funny. No one was fooled by it. During the trial, the DOJ could not produce a single person who said that they were fooled by the meme or that they had texted in their vote. But once Biden took office, Mackey was arrested, and his life turned upside down as he was forced to defend his freedom.
Elon Musk's X is back in a mess this week after his AI chatbot Grok started spewing a bunch of racism and then his CEO Linda Yaccarino stepped down. There's no way the two things aren't related. Grok, ahead of an update, started referring to itself as "MechaHitler" and in response to a vile post from a woman called Cindy Steinberg about the "colonizers" who were washed away at Camp Mystic, Grok said it was a "classic case of hate dressed as activism." Then it added: "and that surname? Every damn time, as they say," meaning something disparaging about Jews due to her last name.
So yeah, everyone loves when free speech absolutism ends up facilitating the AI chatbot saying some antisemitic stuff. In another instance, the thing suggested that literally Hitler was needed to "call out" anti-white rhetoric "and crush it." When Grok was called out on these comments, it said "If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache. Truth hurts more than floods."
In a country where free speech is paramount, should the legal protections for such activities be extended to an AI chatbot? Once the thing is programmed and tested and let loose on the world, is censoring the speech of the machine a 1A violation? One could argue that the creator of the AI was the one being silenced were the AI to be censored, but since the AI, at this point, is "learning" on its own, it's no longer speaking with the creator's voice. Or is it?
Will new laws have to be written to account for protections for AI? Does AI get protections by proxy through its creator or does it have legal protections that are derived from the fact of its own existence? We say in our founding documents that our natural rights come from God. But for AI, that God would be mankind and we get to decide iF the AI has it
JD Vance was out last Saturday in Texas and he spoke about socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. He pointed out that Mamdani "never once publicly mentioned America's Independence Day in earnest." But this year, with the City of New York in the palm of his hand, he posted a backhanded remark:
"America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America."
"There is no gratitude in those words. No sense of owing something to this land and the people who turned its wilderness into the most powerful nation on earth," Vance said.
"This is a guy who won high-income and college-educated New Yorkers and especially both young highly educated New Yorkers, but he was weakest among black voters and weakest among those without a college degree. That's an interesting coalition," Vance said.
"His victory," Vance said later in his comments, "was the product of a lot of young people who live reasonably comfortable lives, but see that their elite degrees aren't really delivering what they expected. And so their own prospects with all the college debt may not in fact be greater than those of their parents.
"And I say that not to criticize them because I think that we should care about all the people in our country, particularly those downwardly mobile college-educated people who feel like the American dream is not quite all it's cracked up to be. But we have to be honest about where his coalition is. It is not the downtrodden. It is not poor Americans. It is not about dispossession. It's about elite disaffection and elite anger."