Persuasion plays a key role in society. Whether it is political or financial decisions, workplace or family choices, or simply reading a book or article (like this one), often someone is trying to persuade someone else to agree with them, possibly by changing their mind. This raises an interesting question: if persuasion is such an important part of life, how good are the latest AI systems in this domain? Are they, for example, better than humans? That is what a research project has just investigated, and on an impressively large scale:

in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters.

The results were unequivocal:

We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with £1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI’s advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments.

An arguably more demanding test found that AI systems were not just persuasive when it came to opinions, but also in terms of real-world actions: they managed to elicit substantially more real-money donations to charity than well-paid professional canvassers. The researchers were able to pin down the two key factors that helped AI to out-perform the best human persuaders in all these tests:

We found converging evidence that AI’s advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages.

That is, AI systems were more persuasive largely thanks to the range of knowledge they could demonstrate, and the speed with which they could present it — precisely those aspects of AI that are improving all the time. Which means that frontier AI systems are likely to become even more persuasive in the future. That sounds a rather bleak prospect, but a commentary from Tom Stafford, professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield, and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, points out that things may not be as bad as they seem:

fact-based persuasion may indeed be effective, but that is good news for human reasonableness, not bad. The way the AI works isn’t some sinister magic; if it produces more facts, it is more persuasive. The constraint that persuasion requires evidence means that what anyone can be persuaded of will ultimately ground out on what can reasonably be claimed about reality. If AI is a tool which produces better-informed citizens and more respect for facts, that can be a positive thing.

That may be true in general, but the original researchers note that there are other factors at play here. For example, access to resources is clearly important:

power could flow to whoever can most readily access and deploy the most capable systems. In practice, that could mean the actors who already command the most resources, such as large private corporations, political campaigns, or nation states. These actors spend heavily to influence public opinion and consumer behaviour, and although the per-message effects of such efforts can be modest, such AI could raise their effectiveness, deepening existing imbalances in who can sway the public.

Another issue is that the persuasive power that comes with the deployment of leading AI systems could increase the clout of top AI companies:

in persuasion contests where both sides can secure access to the most capable systems, such AI could consolidate power by giving significant leverage to the actors that build and control those systems. These actors could tilt the outcome of such contests by, for example, deciding which positions their models will, and will not, argue for. In this case, power would flow not to the users of persuasive AI but to its suppliers, and consolidation of their influence would occur even when access among users is perfectly equal.

More positively, the researchers point out that as constant improvements in technology push down the cost of using persuasive AI

it could help under-resourced actors (e.g., pro se litigants and public defenders, small charities, grassroots activists) compete against more established and better-funded rivals, narrowing long-standing gaps in access to justice and assisting civic advocacy more broadly.

In his blog post, Stafford mentions another factor to consider:

In a world where every surface becomes filled with persuasive text, I don’t think it is inevitable that people will open themselves to being pulled in every direction. Not only do people have a significant degree of native scepticism, tending to resist persuasive efforts as they seek to maintain stability in their existing views, but they also have agency to open themselves, or not, to persuasive effects. The studies reported in this paper asked for an average of 14 minutes of conversation from participants. 14 minutes of sincere engagement might be a lot more than most of us give to alternative points of view in our daily lives.

In other words, we don’t really know yet what impact these highly-persuasive AI systems will have on politics, business, and everyday life. But given their superior ability to convince it seems likely that we will be encountering them more frequently in their role of indefatigable persuader, whether we want that or not.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly. That raises the question of what might replace it, and the book’s last chapter offers one solution in the form of true fans. These are people who love an artist’s work and are happy to support it directly. This allows those works to be made available for no cost, since they have already been funded by fans. That, in turn, means creations can be shared – no need for punitive copyright infringement laws here – thus spreading the word about the artist, and bringing in new true fans and additional financial support.

This system is already working well for books, music and graphical art. But a common criticism of the approach is that it could never work for films, which therefore require copyright protection for them to be made. In support of that claim, people often point to the extremely large budgets of many films, often running to hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, the argument goes, such sums could never be amassed through the donations of true fans.

One issue with that argument is the widespread practice of “Hollywood accounting”, which Wikipedia explains as:

the opaque or “creative” set of accounting methods used by the film, video, television and music industry to budget and record profits for creative projects. Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in taxes and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit.

In other words, those huge budgets may not reflect the real costs of making a film, but are often a scheme for depriving people such as actors and others of their promised share of the profits by minimizing or even eliminating the latter. Moreover, a recent development certainly suggests that successful films do not requires such inflated budgets, discussed here on the BBC site :

Which film would you expect to be a summer hit – a family-friendly action-adventure which is based on tried-and-tested IP (intellectual property)? Or a creepy low-budget horror film dreamt up by a first-time director? Until very recently, most of us would have put our money on the first option.

But this summer, it’s looking as if low-budget horror will be triumphant, with two indie films, Backrooms and Obsession, vanquishing two megabudget extravaganzas, Masters of the Universe and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.

The figures speak for themselves:

The difference between the appeal of tired IP and original movies is illustrated by this weekend’s US box office figures. Masters of the Universe, which derives from a 1980s Mattel toy range and cartoon about a loincloth-sporting, perma-tanned warrior prince, is a new release which made just $29m (£21.7m). The Mandalorian and Grogu, which came out in May, is faring poorly for a Star Wars film: this weekend it made $10m (£7.5m).

By contrast, Backrooms “took $81m (£61m) in the US on its opening weekend. It’s total in the US is now $135m (£101m).” Obsession did even better:

Not only did it have a healthy opening weekend, but it’s also the first film since ET the Extra Terrestrial in 1982 to have its takings go up rather than down in its second and third weekends in cinemas. Its total take is now $152m (£114m) in the US and $225m (£169m) globally.

Those figures are impressive, but what is really noteworthy is the gulf between the respective production costs of the two classes of film. According to the BBC article:

The budget of The Mandalorian and Grogu is reported to be $165m (£124m), and the budget of Masters of the Universe is reported to be $200m (£150m). Take into account the marketing costs, and those films have to make between $300m and $400m (or £225m and £300m) just to break even.

…

The budget for Backrooms, on the other hand: $10m (£7.5m). And Obsession? $1m (£750,000), tops. Suddenly, spending a fortune to make a fortune no longer seems like a winning formula.

The latter sum in particular is easily something that true fans’ funding could amass.

The dynamics behind the growing success of low-budget films – something the BBC article calls “a Hollywood earthquake” – are precisely the ones discussed in the closing chapter of Walled Culture the book. An article on the Guardian Web site puts it this way:

“Going to the movies has become a way to connect with friends and share the moviegoing experience in person. Somewhere you can turn your phone off for a few hours and just disconnect from the world,” says 22-year-old film TikToker Florence Rose.

It is about the sense of community, which lies at the heart of the true fans idea, one that extends beyond the cinema experience:

Apps such as Letterboxd – essentially the Goodreads of cinema – allow users to distil their reactions into sharp, ironic one-liners and scroll through the takes of other viewers. “Gen Z are yearning for community, and through apps like Letterboxd, which continues to see an increase in popularity, people can find that community of like-minded individuals and share their thoughts and feelings about films,” says Rose.

The rise of Letterboxd is indicative of the hunger for precisely this kind of community-based experience:

The platform, whose core audience is 18- to 24-year-olds, has grown from 1.7 million users in 2020 to 26 million in 2026, adding more than nine million since January 2025 alone. “When a movie is released in the cinema, online conversations are sparked, which drives more people to the cinema so they can feel like they can join in and be a part of those conversations,” Rose adds.

This move from the Hollywood-style blockbusters to low-budget films made by new directors – often emerging from the world of YouTube – and new production houses is great news for audiences eager for new experiences and a sense of community. It not only brings fresh talent to the art form, it also opens up the possibility of fan-funded films that manage the difficult trick of being thoughtful and popular.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

The central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is the growing incompatibility between traditional copyright law and the digital, online world. The culmination of that process was the EU Copyright Directive, passed in 2019. The Directive was supposed to be transposed into local laws by 2021, but a year after that deadline, many EU member states had failed to do so. Nor was that a case of mild slippage; a recent report from Communia provides an update on how the implementations are going. Here’s what it found for one of the most contentious areas of the Directive:

the introduction of the press publishers’ right under Article 15 has not been matched by consistent implementation of the mandatory limits intended to contain its scope. Despite the largely prescriptive nature of the Directive, a significant number of Member States have failed to fully implement these safeguards. In addition, some jurisdictions have chosen not to apply existing copyright exceptions to the new right, resulting in a broader scope of protection for press publishers than for other rightholders and further contributing to fragmentation across the internal market.

That fragmentation is deeply ironic, because one of the main justifications for a new copyright Directive was to bring consistency across the EU. As for the even more controversial upload filters, they have proved so difficult to implement that most governments have not even tried to lay down how they should be used:

Most Member States have limited themselves to restating the Directive’s requirement that lawful uploads must not be blocked, leaving the practical balancing of copyright enforcement and freedom of expression largely to platforms and courts. While a small number of jurisdictions have introduced stronger safeguards – such as ex ante protections against overblocking, transparency obligations, and mechanisms to address abusive claims – these remain the exception. As a result, the level of protection for lawful user expression continues to vary across Member States.

Again the much-vaunted consistency that the Directive would bring to EU copyright law is nowhere to be seen. If those failures underline that, as predicted, the EU Copyright Directive has turned out to be a bad law, badly implemented, arguably the arrival of generative AI has made many of its measures completely moot. As Walled Culture has reported, the idea that copyright is largely irrelevant in a world full of AI-generated material – something first suggested on this blog back in October 2022 – is now increasingly mainstream.

But things are still moving fast in the world of generative AI, with yet more profound implications for copyright. A recent post on the IPKat blog explores one of them: the rise of a powerful new generation of AI models that can be run on a personal computer – or even on a smartphone. Many of the latest models coming out of China are not just open source software, but open weight – that is, the models’ numerical values that get set when a model is trained are released, too, so that anyone can download, run, study, and modify them. As a good introduction to this new wave of Chinese AI innovation in Technology Review explains:

If these open-source AI models keep getting better, they will not just offer the cheapest options for people who want access to frontier AI capabilities; they will change where innovation happens and who sets the standards.

One big impact they are likely to have is on the enforcement of copyright, not least in the EU. The IPKat post notes:

The spectrum of engagement with [open source and open weight] models clearly challenges the copyright system. A system, in this Kat’s view, which, until recently, was oriented around individual acts of copying, with platforms cast as new points of interference to bridge technological enforcement gaps. However, [user-generated content] occurring on AI model marketplaces demands a shift in rhetoric and approach. Their ability to redistribute creative agency and control over the tools of cultural production should prompt us to reflect on how copyright law should respond to creativity that occurs through shared infrastructures.

The EU Copyright Directive’s core assumption that the main forums for sharing material would be a few, easily controllable online giants like Google and Facebook, no longer holds. Instead, people are moving to world where millions of people are using the latest generation of open source AI tools collaboratively to generate creations. Those may or may not be based on existing copyright material, but there is no easy way to police that. As the IPKat post points out:

For users running these [new open source and open weight] models locally, they no longer need to pay per request, nor is their data shared with AI companies, and by extension, rightsholders through Article 53(c) of the AI Act.

The world of generative AI is so complex, and moving so quickly, that it is no wonder that even the relatively recent EU AI Act, which entered into force two years ago, is being left behind by the latest developments. And the EU Copyright Directive, which was drawn up nearly a decade ago, is the digital equivalent of the UK’s 1865 Red Flag Act, which governed “self-propelled vehicles”, and required “a man with a red flag was to walk at least 60 yd (55 m) ahead of each vehicle”.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to Walled Culture.

Legal systems have always struggled to keep up with rapid technological change, and things are no different in the world of generative AI. There are still relatively few rulings on the new issues that the roll-out of AI-based services is raising. That makes a ground-breaking judgment from a court in Germany particularly important. It concerns the AI Overview that sits at the top of the Google’s search results. The Decoder summarizes the court’s ruling:

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the “AI overview” is its own content, not just a list of search results.

Google’s AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn’t appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn’t respond appropriately.

The legal innovation here is that the local German court held Google liable for the content of its AI Overview. Unlike traditional search results, which simply point to external sources of information, Google’s AI Overview made statements that were original, the court said:

Google’s AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results “in its own words and according to its own structure,” the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like “Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices,” then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users.

The court also found that the AI overview made claims “that are not even made in the search results.” None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these “the defendant’s own statements.”

Google argued that people using its search engine could check the results, but the court dismissed the idea that this was the responsibility of the users. Leaving aside the fact that research from the Pew Research Center last year found that “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” there is also the difficulty of checking statements that have been made up (as in this case), which therefore come with no reference links. The court also dealt with the issue of free speech protection for AI-generated content:

An AI’s opinion is “not the expression of an acquired conviction of the persons expressing it, but the result of an algorithm,” the court wrote.

Offering AI-powered research is “above all an expression of Google’s business activities” and “at most a secondary expression of an interest in being able to freely express one’s opinion and beliefs.”

In a statement given to The Decoder, Google said “We invest deeply in the quality of AI Overviews to ensure that the overwhelming majority of responses provide accurate information, and they are designed to reflect the information that exists on the web.”

Since there is no way to ensure that AI responses are 100% correct, this judgment is a big problem for Google, not least because the company plans to place AI Overviews at the heart of its new AI-saturated search engine, as Techdirt reported recently. Not surprisingly, Google has announced that it will appeal against the ruling, which comes from a local German court. If a higher court upholds the judgment, one solution would be for Google to remove AI Overviews in Germany. That would be messy, but doable. But it’s not clear how other AI companies such as chatbots could do the same, since the AI-generated response generally forms the basis of the whole service. Some might choose to discontinue their operations completely in any jurisdiction that adopts a similar position to the Munich court. That would make the roll-out of international services more difficult.

In a post on his blog, the security guru Bruce Schneier points out that if the ruling stands and is adopted elsewhere, it could have important implications not just for things like Google’s AI Overviews and chatbots, but also for the increasingly popular AI agents:

More generally, liability concerns could mean that many current use cases for agents won’t be commercially viable. Companies may not be able to profitably operate AI lawyers, doctors and media influencers if they are held responsible for what they say and do.

Schneier says that he is “OK with this outcome”:

There’s nothing in the law that requires us to accommodate AI systems if they are fundamentally untrustworthy, just as we don’t need to accommodate untrustworthy human systems. Any company that won’t stand by the statements its agents make—whether human or AI—doesn’t deserve users’ time or money.

Clearly this question of AI and agentic liability requires urgent legal clarification. The German decision should at least help to concentrate people’s minds on the topic.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

Afew weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about Hadopi, France’s infamous copyright enforcement mechanism. The so-called “graduated response” – aka “three strikes and you are out” – has been around for over 15 years now, has cost French taxpayers a fortune, and has never achieved any of its aims. As the Walled Culture post suggested, the latest court ruling might finally put the benighted scheme out of its misery.

But even if it does, there is already another disproportionately heavy-handed attempt to enforce copyright up and running in the shape of Italy’s Piracy Shield. It works by blocking access to unauthorized material using court orders against Internet Service Providers (ISPs). That would clearly be problematic, even if it were implemented properly, and well run. It is neither, as academic research from the end of last year underlined. Since the massive extension of its powers a year ago, things have gone relatively quiet on the Piracy Shield front in terms of new developments, and there are no signs that the Italian government has taken the many criticisms to heart.

That’s depressing enough, but even more worrying is that alongside France’s Hadopi fiasco, and Italy’s troubling Piracy Shield, Spain too seems intent on letting the copyright industry attack the Internet’s basic plumbing and thereby disrupt other sites, as well as downgrading the experience of thousands of innocent users. It’s increasingly clear that what’s happening in Spain is now a serious a threat to the operation of the online world there, but one that is still little-known. That makes a post from the Disruptive Competition Project (DisCo), which comes from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), particularly useful. Its title picks up on the similarities with Italy’s approach: “Repeating Failure: How Spanish Overblocking Ignores the Lessons of Italy’s Broken Piracy Shield”. Here’s what has been happening in Spain for over a year now:

Since early 2025, LaLiga (Spain’s top-tier football league) has been operating an aggressive and largely unchecked IP-address blocking regime in an attempt to tackle sports piracy. In 2024, LaLiga and several Spanish internet service providers (ISPs), some of whom have direct commercial interests in LaLiga broadcasting, sought a court order authorising the blocking of specific domain names.

They succeeded in this particular endeavour. However, LaLiga has thereafter continued to interpret this order as a green light to unilaterally select Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and domains to block, without ongoing court oversight or accountability.

It turns out that the legal basis of the current action is flimsy in the extreme:

The legal foundation of LaLiga’s anti-piracy enforcement model rests on a single, seven-page judgment issued by a Commercial Court in Barcelona on 18 December 2024. This ruling should have never been treated as setting a strong precedent, as it was not the result of a rigorous legal battle and didn’t seriously examine whether the blocking approach is lawful or proportionate under EU law.

As has happened so often in the world of copyright, the companies involved have taken a very narrow, and possibly flawed legal judgment and applied it as widely and broadly as possible, without asking further permission from the courts:

LaLiga now compiles and updates lists of IP addresses and domain names that it wants to see blocked. This process is completely opaque: these lists are not publicly disclosed, there is no independent technical or judicial validation before new addresses are added, and the court does not appear to continuously review any additions.

Once someone gets blocked, there is no redress mechanism to remove addresses from the list, even when they are no longer associated with infringing content, nor any appeal process for mistakenly blocked services.

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that this cavalier approach has already led to the overblocking of sites, just as has happened in Italy because of Piracy Shield’s poor implementation:

LaLiga’s approach has caused widespread disruption, preventing access to tens of thousands of legitimate websites in recent years – including critical services such as payment providers and a national health operator. This disproportionate cost is borne by innocent third parties and small businesses, reflecting a mistaken belief that the commercial interests of one dominant party should trump Spanish consumers’ rights to a functioning internet.

The second of those overblocking incidents is particularly serious, since it involves a healthcare provider, which potentially puts people’s lives at risk. According to an article on La Razón (via Google Translate):

During the weekend of December 13-14, access to the Madrid Health website was blocked. While the duration of the access interruption and the message displayed upon entering the website varied depending on the internet service provider blocking access at LaLiga’s request.

Despite the serious nature of this overblocking, which effectively places the enforcement of copyright above protecting people’s health, the Spanish government is trying to wash its hands of the problem:

The situation has become so severe that members of the Spanish Parliament have sought explanations from the government. While acknowledging that the blocks have significantly impacted legitimate websites, the Spanish Government maintains that this is a judicial matter falling under the jurisdiction of the courts.

However, the courts seem to be entirely on the side of LaLiga, since they didn’t even give Internet companies a chance to present their side of the story earlier this year.

In February 2026, the Commercial Court of Córdoba even granted [LaLiga] an ex-parte preliminary injunction against NordVPN and ProtonVPN. This means the court issued a binding order, based solely on LaLiga’s arguments, without notifying those virtual private networks (VPNs) or allowing them to present a defence beforehand. The VPNs only discovered the judgment through the media and are now obliged to implement the blocks enforced by LaLiga.

It’s true that the same court has just rejected LaLiga’s request for coercive fines, and accepted that there was a technical dispute over whether the blocking could be implemented. But the refusal to allow the VPN companies to present a defense remains a deeply troubling precedent, and runs contrary to basic principles of justice. Moreover, as TorrentFreak reports, this latest ruling may be only a temporary reprieve for the VPN providers:

The league confirms that the decision merely sets aside the coercive fines while the proceedings continue, stressing that it does not exempt NordVPN from implementing IP blocks where LaLiga can prove piracy is taking place.

It is the usual one-sided justice that is typical when copyright is involved. It seems that LaLiga is being given carte blanche to do whatever it likes here, and never mind the consequences for Internet companies and their users. As Hadopi fades, and Italy’s Piracy Shield carries on as before, the fear has to be that Spain’s unconstrained approach to copyright enforcement could end up being worse than both.

There is currently a rare opportunity to comment on the issue of EU copyright enforcement in the realm of sports and other live events. There is an open Call for Evidence from the European Commission, which:

aims to collect the information necessary to support the review of the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, and to seek feedback on the challenges linked in particular to the exercise of copyright and related rights in the context of technological developments and potential ways to address them.

As well as that general review of the main EU Copyright Directive, discussed at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), and the issue of live streaming, the Commission is seeking people’s views on an important upcoming legislative proposal aimed at strengthening copyright (yet again) in the light of AI, which is planned for the first quarter of 2027. The Call for Evidence closes on 25 June, so you have a couple of weeks to hone your thoughts and submit them. Based on previous experience, we can probably expect the European Commission to ignore what anyone except the copyright industry thinks, but it’s worth a try.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Republished from WalledCulture.

Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honor belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has been synonymous with online searching, providing the quickest and most effective way to find things online (although its results may be getting worse.) More recently, it has been adding to its search engine more features based on generative AI, first with its AI Overviews in 2024, and then a year later with its AI Mode in Search. Now it has announced the latest stage in that evolution with what it calls “A new era for AI Search”:

It’s more intuitive than ever, dynamically expanding to give you space to describe exactly what you need. Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete. And you can search across modalities, using text, images, files, videos or Chrome tabs as inputs.

This new incarnation effectively turns search into a chatbot:

You can easily ask a follow-up question right from an AI Overview, and flow into a conversational back and forth with AI Mode. Your context stays with you, and as you explore more deeply, the links and supporting articles get even more relevant. This seamless experience is live today across desktop and mobile, worldwide.

As the the screenshot of the new interface above shows, the traditional search result links that are currently placed under the AI Overview have now been confined to a small panel on the right-hand side of the screen, which shows a cut-down version of today’s list. Users are encouraged to ask follow-up questions from the AI search chatbot, rather than exploring the links themselves.

What this is likely to mean in practice is that even fewer people will follow links to sites, something that was already happening last year; instead, they will engage with Google’s chatbot to gather information indirectly. This is terrible news for access to knowledge because it frames the Google AI search engine as the fount of all knowledge – one that will do all the hard work of finding information and combining it into an easily digested answer that can be interrogated further. It can do that because it has already ingested billions of Web pages and other information sources as part of the Large Language Model (LLM) training process. But search engine users will no longer know what some of those sources are unless they painstakingly click on the links in the new panel.

Most people will not bother, because the AI-generated results will be good enough – or at least will appear to be good enough. Unless visitors to the site take the trouble to follow the links to the sources they won’t really know how reliable those results are. For example, it is possible that the sources are wrong, or misleading; moreover, Google’s LLM may itself introduce new errors and distortions. There is also the question of how Google will insert ads into this AI-generated information, and to what extent advertisers will be able to buy preferential treatment in results.

This new mediated approach is clearly terrible news for Wikipedia – an issue already discussed on Walled Culture earlier this year – and for creators. Google will use the information found in their works, but will not actively encourage people to visit the originals. For many people, summaries will be good enough, and they will never discover the greater riches of the sites and creations that Google’s LLM is based on. Worse still, the original creators such as Wikipedia may not even be mentioned in answers that involve aggregating information from a large number of sources.

Similarly, the new Google search is the publishing industry’s worst nightmare. Not only is Google drawing on material they have published, but it is pushing links to those sources into the background. It seems inevitable that the Web traffic to publishers will fall yet further, making already struggling business models based on advertising even more precarious. That will have knock-on consequences for the funding of many sites – particularly newspapers and magazines – and for the commissioning of work from journalists and other creative professionals. Users won’t even need to visit Google Search much in order to keep up-to-date with topics of interest thanks to Google Search’s new agentic capabilities that will do the work for them in advance:

With information agents, you can stay updated on whatever matters most to you. Your agent will intelligently look across everything on the web, like blogs, news sites and social posts, plus our freshest data, such as real-time info on finance, shopping and sports, to monitor for changes related to your specific question.

In this case, not only will people not visit sites, but the latter will be constantly bombarded by various AI bots seeking information on behalf of users – increasing site running costs, and making sites less usable by humans. Another key announcement from Google will lead to a further flood of agentic activities that will pose new challenges to businesses:

We’re also expanding agentic booking capabilities in Search to a wide range of new tasks, including local experiences and services. Just share your specific criteria — like finding a private karaoke room for six on a Friday night that serves food late — and Search brings together the latest pricing and availability with direct links to finish booking through the provider of your choice. And for select categories like home repair, beauty or pet care, you can ask Google to call businesses on your behalf.

What emerges from Google’s latest announcements is less of a search engine, and more of an immersive virtual environment that is designed to keep people engaging with Google’s services, asking them for information, advice and even delegating actions to them. There is no doubt that many users will find these new features attractive, not least because they can use “conversational voice features” in Gmail, Docs and elsewhere. These are the digital assistants that have been promised for many years, able to understand spoken commands, provide information verbally, and carry out complex operations on behalf of users without the need for any complex training. For many people, that will be a boon, and they will doubtless migrate from the traditional search page, which will still be the default – at least for now – to the latest AI-infused version.

But these impressive technical features come at a high price, even leaving aside issues such as the environmental impact of the huge server farms they require. With the latest incarnation of its search engine, Google is making the World Wide Web as we have known it for over 30 years invisible, and therefore increasingly irrelevant to most people, who will be happy to let Google become their universal user interface to everything. And yet Google still depends on the Internet to supply all the information it is analyzing and repackaging. It risks killing the very thing that sustains it.

There’s another, more subtle issue. The new Google search features make finding information and carrying out actions very easy in many ways. Leaving aside the problem that this will require people to trust what is in effect a huge black box, where the internal workings cannot be examined, with all the loss of control this implies, there is another danger. People who use Google’s powerful new AI search services to offload many of their day-to-day actions may gradually lose the ability to understand the world and to act within it without that constant help. Such a dependence may be great for Google and its advertisers, but it surely cannot be a good thing for the future of society.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to WalledCulture.

One of the best demonstrations that an obsession with protecting copyright’s intellectual monopoly drives politicians insane is the French law known as Hadopi, an acronym for ‘Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur internet’ (High Authority for the Dissemination of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet). The Hadopi mechanism has been trying – and failing – to police copyright’s intellectual monopoly in France for 15 years now, and it is one of the main villains in the Walled Culture book (free digital versions available).

Here’s how Hadopi’s “graduated response” approach worked when a revised version came into operation in 2010. Alleged infringers were warned twice; if another allegation was made within a year of the second warning, the subscriber’s Internet connection could be suspended. A fine of €1,500 could also be imposed. The first notices were sent out in September 2010; by December of that year, copyright companies were issuing between 25,000 and 50,000 infringement allegations per day. At the end of July 2013, Hadopi had issued 2 million first notices and 200,000 second notices. There were 710 investigations to ascertain whether those who had been accused three times should be referred to the prosecutors.

That gives an idea of the scale of the investigations into people’s everyday use of the Internet in France, and of the databases of personal data that were created. And yet the first and only disconnection order, issued in June 2013, turned out to be unenforceable, because the disconnection only applied to Web access – other services like email, private messaging, the telephone line or TV services had to be preserved somehow – and was later dropped.

By 2020, Hadopi had been in existence in various forms for a decade. Working from Hadopi’s annual report for that year, the French magazine Next INpact calculated that in total the agency had imposed €87,000 in fines. The cost of running Hadopi was picked up entirely by French taxpayers and came to €82 million. In other words, a system that had failed to discourage people downloading unauthorized copies of copyright material, had also cost nearly a thousand times more to run than it generated in fines.

As Walled Culture reported at the time, in 2023 the French digital rights organization La Quadrature du Net brought a challenge to the Hadopi system, still running in theory, on the grounds that it was incompatible with the two EU laws defining Europe’s data protection regime, the General Data Protection Regulation and the ePrivacy Directive. Shockingly, in 2024 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court, ruled that “the general and indiscriminate retention of [Internet Protocol] addresses does not necessarily constitute a serious interference with fundamental rights”. La Quadrature du Net did not give up. Alongside the case at the CJEU, it was also taking legal action in France:

In 2019, we asked the Conseil d’État to overturn Hadopi’s central decree, which authorises the storage of personal data needed for the graduated response system (IP addresses, civil identity and downloaded material). The case was referred to the Constitutional Council and in 2020 we had our first partial victory: the Constitutional Council restricted Hadopi’s broad access to personal data (the law at the time provided that it could access “all documents”). However, despite to our initial assessment, this did not necessarily mark the end of the Hadopi.

The defeat handed down by the CJEU in 2024 offered a glimmer of hope:

The outcome was disappointing, as we lost on the principle: the CJEU agreed to weaken its case law. It accepted that access to metadata might, in certain cases, not be subjected to prior independent review. However, it required numerous conditions to this possibility, relating to both the retention of such data and the requirements for prior independent review.

Those two issues – retention of metadata and the requirement for prior independent review – have now been acknowledged as problematic by the Conseil d’État in a new ruling:

the Conseil d’État finally agreed with us on these two points. Firstly, it found that the retention of metadata is not carried out in a manner that safeguards civil liberties. The CJEU required “watertight separation” of IP addresses and civil identity data (which can be understood as two distinct databases, or files, that can only be technically correlated after a formal request for access by Arcom). The Conseil d’État notes that “no legal provision imposes such retention, under these conditions, on electronic communications operators”.

Secondly, it also notes that access to this data is not subject to independent review. It fully endorses the conclusions already made by the CJEU, that Arcom [the body that took over Hadopi’s role] cannot be both judge and jury: it cannot request access and then review the legality of that access itself, even though it is an independent authority. However, like the CJEU, the Conseil d’État considers that this lack of review is only an issue from the third access to the data onwards, the stage at which a registered letter is sent.

As La Quadrature du Net notes, in practical terms, this latest ruling means that Hadopi is “stalled”:

The Arcom can no longer take you to court, as the requirements set by the CJEU are not satisfied. And it can only send you an email if it has first ensured that your internet service provider has stored your metadata with a “watertight separation”. It has now been downgraded to the function of a giant spam machine.

Hadopi is not quite dead yet: the French government could try to solve the two problems pointed out by the CJEU and confirmed by the Conseil d’État, by setting up yet more independent bodies to handle these specific aspects of Hadopi. That would involve throwing even more taxpayers’ money at an approach that has not only failed completely, but which is fundamentally misguided. Clearly, trying to keep the moribund Hadopi alive in this way would be an irrational and wasteful thing for the French government to contemplate; but given this is the world of copyright, it might well try to do it anyway.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

It is widely accepted that drones have changed the conduct of modern war dramatically. The war in Ukraine, in particular, is driving the rapid evolution of drone technology. Evidence of how far things have come was provided recently by the following claim from Ukraine, reported here on The Next Web (TNW):

In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that his forces had, for the first time in the history of warfare, seized an enemy position using only unmanned systems. No infantry. No human soldiers entering the contested ground. Drones and ground robots identified the target, suppressed defensive fire, and captured the position without a single Ukrainian casualty. The claim has not been independently verified in detail, and Ukraine’s military has declined to provide specifics.

The TNW article goes on to give some details about the company that apparently played a major role in that unmanned assault:

a Ukrainian-British defence technology startup called UFORCE, has conducted more than 150,000 combat missions since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, achieved unicorn status with a valuation exceeding one billion dollars, and is now scaling production from a discreet London headquarters designed, the company says, to protect it from Russian sabotage. The age of unmanned warfare is no longer a conference-circuit prediction. It is a line item on a defence contractor’s balance sheet.

Politico interviewed the Ukrainian commander in charge of the Third Assault Brigade’s ground robotic systems unit, the one which carried out the attack. Mykola Zinkevych provided some interesting indications of what robotic systems were already doing today, and what Ukraine’s future plans were for unmanned warfare systems. For example, Zinkevych said:

Delivery of important cargo, evacuation of the wounded, conducting surveillance in open areas, destruction of enemy fortifications, sabotage operations behind enemy lines, laying minefields — all this is now performed by ground robotic systems

In the short term:

Infantrymen can and should be taken out of direct fire. Our goal for 2026 is to replace up to 30 percent of personnel in the most difficult areas of the front with technology

In a post on Facebook (in Ukrainian), Zinkevych gave details of the ambitious longer-term goals (via Google Translate), which will involve the wider deployment of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV):

In March alone, 9,000+ missions were completed by the military. Our goal is for 100% of front-line logistics to be performed by robotic systems.

In the first half of 2026, due to increased demand, we will contract 25,000 UGVs, which will be gradually delivered to the front. This is twice as much as in the entire year 2025.

A new paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, written by the former defense minister of Ukraine, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, explores what he calls “The New Revolution in Military Affairs”, which is being brought about by “rapid innovation and adaptation, introducing new types of unmanned systems, countermeasures, and operating methods at unprecedented speed.” A key element of this is “affordable precise mass” — the highly effective deployment of cheap, long-range drones on a massive scale. He calls this transformation:

a structural shift in warfare in which new technologies drive the development of novel operational concepts and doctrines, fundamentally altering how military power is generated and employed, and forcing enduring changes in military organizations. These trends include the emergence of affordable precise mass, the fragmentation of the air domain, the growing difficulty of maneuver, the centrality of networked warfare, and the elevation of rapid adaptation as a core military capability. This transformation is still in its early stages, but countries that fail to recognize and adapt to it risk preparing for a form of war that has lost its decisiveness.

One important aspect of this shift touches on an area that will be familiar to Techdirt readers. As noted in the quotation above, Zagorodnyuk underlines the importance of rapid adaptation for this new kind of warfare:

The decisive advantage lies with those who can shorten the loop between combat experience, technical adaptation, and redeployment. As a result, ultra-fast adaptation becomes a paramount requirement for survival—and directly shapes force organization.

In Ukraine, this has led to drone operators being deeply involved in the technology’s evolution:

Units maintain their own repair facilities, component stocks, and small-scale production capabilities. Some operate informal research-and-development cells. Successful adaptations spread laterally through personal networks, messaging platforms, and volunteer communities rather than through centralized bureaucratic channels.

But Zagorodnyuk points out a key reason why the important lessons emerging from the wars in Ukraine and Iran are unlikely to be learned in many Western countries, including the US:

legal, contractual, and technical restrictions often prevent units from modifying or repairing their own equipment. In the United States, for example, defense contractors frequently retain control over maintenance data, software, and diagnostics, limiting what military personnel can do independently. The debate around the “right to repair” reflects this tension. While intended to protect intellectual property and safety standards, such restrictions can slow adaptation cycles and reduce operational flexibility—precisely the opposite of what high-intensity, technology-driven warfare now demands.

In other words, today’s obsession with protecting intellectual monopolies above all else could one day prove a major obstacle to fighting — and winning — future wars.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. 

As numerous posts on this blog have emphasised, the underlying idea of open access (OA) – allowing anyone to read and share published academic research for free – is great in principle, but in practice has failed in important ways. That’s because traditional academic publishers have subverted the open access model to such an extent that the costs for research institutions of publishing in OA journals have barely changed at all. And yet one of the other key aims of open access was to save money while widening availability. Against that background, a natural question to ask is: if open access has failed to deliver savings, why bother supporting it? Cancer Research UK, the world’s leading cancer charity, has evidently asked itself that question and come up with an answer, which it explains in a post entitled “Why we won’t be funding open access publishing any more”:

We need efficient scholarly communications to spread scientific ideas via a fair economic model. We currently don’t have that. The open access movement was bold and promising, but ultimately disappointing. Now is the time to stop and call for a new way to make publishing work…

…

Ceasing to fund open access in the way we currently do will save us £5.2m of donors’ money over the next three years. That’s a substantial amount which can be put towards cancer research.

The post by Dan Burkwood, Director of Research Operations and Communications at Cancer Research UK, explains what exactly the problem is:

We currently fund open access publishing for our researchers in a number of ways. Despite hopes that this would enable a flourishing of open access dissemination of science, most of the growth has occurred in hybrid journals. These are publications that combine OA articles with those behind a paywall – this means the publishers will still charge for university and institute libraries to access them, even though researchers have paid for their work to be published. For us, this means we currently use donated money to fund our researchers, institutes and centres to publish OA research articles, yet they still have to pay to access the majority of journals in which those articles appear. The publishers are – so to speak – having their cake whilst also eating it.

These so-called “hybrid models” are discussed at length in Chapter 3 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). They were presented as a transitional approach towards journals that were fully open access, but in many cases that transition hasn’t happened, not least because the hybrid model is so profitable for publishers, who therefore have little incentive to move to fully open access titles. Burkwood rightly points to a key reason why academic publishers continue to wield such power: the academic world’s insistence on using published articles in prestigious titles as a metric of success.

Cancer Research UK are working to widen the way we evaluate research in order to mitigate the heavy focus on publication outputs. It’s clear to us that a broader view of an applicant’s career is vital to gauge potential success. By signing up to DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), we encourage our reviewers to assess the quality and impact of research through means other than just journal impact factor. Additionally, we invite applicants to submit a narrative CV, allowing a more holistic view of their track record, research outputs and career progression.

But as he acknowledges, “Despite our, and others, attempts to limit the emphasis of the ‘publish-or-perish’ mindset, it will take time for the culture to change.” In the meantime, he suggests:

If researchers have no access to publishing funds they can publish their work for open access at no cost, but the publication will sit behind a paywall for 6 months (under embargo) before being deposited on Europe PMC open access – this is known as green open access.

Green open access provides full and free access to papers, but only after an embargo period, typically six months, but sometimes longer (gold open access provides instant access, but requires payment by researchers’ institutions.) That makes green OA a poor substitute for real, immediate open access.

The problem here is that such embargo periods have long been accepted as the norm, but that is only because a terrible blunder was made over two decades ago by the Research Councils UK (RCUK). In 2005, the RCUK stipulated that the work it funded would require open access publication. However, when the final version of the RCUK’s policy appeared in June 2006, it had a significant flaw, expressed in the following provision: ‘Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example embargo periods or provisions limiting the use of deposited content to non-commercial purposes, are respected by authors.’ As the leading open access scholar Peter Suber wrote at the time, this was a completely unnecessary concession:

Researchers sign funding contracts with the research councils long before they sign copyright transfer agreements with publishers. Funders have a right to dictate terms, such as mandated open access, precisely because they are upstream from publishers. If one condition of the funding contract is that the grantee will deposit the peer-reviewed version of any resulting publication in an open-access repository [immediately], then publishers have no right to intervene.

At the root of the issue of embargoes lies copyright. If researchers retained full control of the copyright of their articles, rather than assigning it to publishers, they could prevent any embargoes being applied to them.

Cancer Research UK’s decision is regrettable but understandable. The fear has to be that others will follow suit. While the hybrid model is not universal, it is widespread enough to undermine the open access idea. Until researchers refuse to publish in such hybrid titles, publishers will continue to profit from them. Given the unnecessary embargoes imposed on articles released under green open access, that leaves alternatives such as diamond open access, where there are no charges for anyone, an approach that has long been espoused on this blog.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

As its name suggests, generative AI is designed to generate material in response to prompts by drawing on its probabilistic database built up through analyzing huge quantities of training input. But it can draw on those patterns to analyze other files, and that’s also a widely used application. Writing in The Argument, Kelsey Piper encountered an interesting variant of that approach:

Recently, Anthropic released a new version of Claude, Opus 4.7. I did what I usually do when a new AI model is released by Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic and ran a bunch of tests on it to see what it can do. One of those tests is to paste in some text from unpublished drafts of mine and ask it to guess the author.

…

From only the above text [not shown here], 125 words, Claude Opus 4.7 informed me that the likeliest author is Kelsey Piper. This is an Opus 4.7-specific power; ChatGPT guessed Yglesias, and Gemini guessed Scott Alexander. I did not have memory enabled, nor did I have information about me associated with my account; I did these tests in Incognito Mode.

As Piper admits:

this is far from an impossible feat of style identification — a lot of my writing is public on the internet, and this is clearly the start of a political column, narrowing the possible authors down dramatically.

She went on to input less obvious material. For example, an “unpublished draft of a school progress report in a completely different register”:

“Kelsey Piper,” said Claude. (ChatGPT guessed Freddie deBoer. Gemini guessed Duncan Sabien.)

An unpublished fantasy novel produced a similar result, although:

in that case it took more like 500 words for Claude to inform me that it’s the work of Kelsey Piper (whereas ChatGPT flattered me by guessing that I’m real fantasy novelist K.J. Parker).

And finally, “a college application essay I wrote 15 years ago, when my prose style was vastly worse and frankly embarrassing to reread”:

“Kelsey Piper,” said Claude, and in this case, also ChatGPT.

Piper comments:

Right now, today’s AI tools probably can be used to deanonymize any writer who has a large public corpus of writing under their real name and also writes anonymously, unless they have been extremely careful, for years, to make sure that nothing written under their secondary account has the stylistic fingerprints of their primary one. Many academics and industry researchers, for instance, have reported being identified from a draft or in the middle of a chat.

And she concludes:

Whatever goods anonymity ever offered us, we will have to do without them. I don’t want the anonymous posters to all go away and for everyone to frantically delete all their old internet presence before it surfaces, but more than anything, I don’t want them to be surprised.

Those links to other cases of unpublished material being recognized by AI show that Piper’s experience was not a one-off, although the results remain in the realm of anecdata. But even if imperfect, the ability of generative AI to carry out this kind of analysis quickly and often accurately represents an important new option for the well-established field of stylometry. Wikipedia explains:

Stylometry may be used to unmask pseudonymous or anonymous authors, or to reveal some information about the author short of a full identification. Authors may use adversarial stylometry to resist this identification by eliminating their own stylistic characteristics without changing the meaningful content of their communications. It can defeat analyses that do not account for its possibility, but the ultimate effectiveness of stylometry in an adversarial environment is uncertain: stylometric identification may not be reliable, but nor can non-identification be guaranteed; adversarial stylometry’s practice itself may be detectable.

The limitations of stylometry were demonstrated in John Carreyrou’s attempt to reveal the true identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, published in The New York Times a few weeks ago. Carreyrou concluded that various real-world coincidences plus linguistic evidence indicated that Bitcoin was created by the 55-year-old British computer scientist Adam Back, something Back denies. Carreyrou’s attempts to use computerized stylometry (not the AI services Piper drew on) were unsatisfactory, and he eventually adopted a more hands-on approach to text analysis, which involved looking at Satoshi’s vocabulary, grammatical hyphenation mistakes and the use of British spellings.

Despite Carreyrou’s lack of success, stylometric analysis by generative AI is likely to become more common in many disciplines for the simple reason it is so quick, easy and cheap to carry out. Even if its results are unreliable, people may find it useful as a stimulus for further investigations. And as we know, the fact that generative AI systems can churn out nonsense hasn’t stopped hundreds of millions of people from using and trusting them anyway.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.