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Washington Post

The breathless reactions to ChatGPT remind Mar Hicks, a historian of technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, of the furor that greeted ELIZA, a pathbreaking 1960s chatbot that adopted the language of psychotherapy to generate plausible-sounding responses to users’ queries. ELIZA’s developer, Joseph Weizenbaum, was “aghast” that people were interacting with his little experiment as if it were a real psychotherapist. “People are always waiting for something to be dazzled by,” Hicks said.

Mass Device

“If someone eats lunch at noon every day and the meal has usually 20 to 30 grams of carbohydrates, then if their current blood glucose level is not very low, at 11:45 we could say, ‘Everything indicates that the trend of this day is a typical weekday for this person, so let’s give them, not the whole dose of insulin, but a little bit of it so that it will blunt the meal effect on the glucose,’” said Ali Cinar, director of the Engineering Center for Diabetes Research and Education.

WTTW

A.I. algorithms work by going into large datasets of work posted online from various sources to help photo apps like Lensa generate self-portraits for users in different styles, said Jennifer deWinter, dean of Lewis College of Science and Letters at Illinois Tech. DeWinter said this presents a copyright issue, but because it’s a computer program generating the images, it makes it hard to trace back who is actually culpable. “It’s a problem of a giant, diffused system of multiple actors,” she said.

WGN Radio

A Christian graphic designer’s objection to making websites for same-sex weddings has landed before the Supreme Court, which could allow commercial businesses serving the public to discriminate based on sexual orientation. “I don't know of a situation where rights have been recognized and then the court moved away from them,” said Carolyn Shapiro, constitutional law professor at Chicago-Kent.

New York Times

State constitutions set rules for federal elections, such as requiring votes by ballot instead of by voice, even under the Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution, said constitutional law professor Carolyn Shapiro. “There’s nothing in the contemporaneous materials to suggest that anybody intended” what proponents of the independent state legislature theory contend.

WTTW

“The independent state legislature theory would create a situation where if a state court said, ‘Well, this law is unconstitutional under our state constitution,’ it would still have to apply to federal elections,” law professor Carolyn Shapiro said. “We’d end up with this very bizarre dual system that would be chaotic and confusing, and it’s completely unlike anything we’ve ever had.”