Artificial Intelligence

Just recently, a 13-year-old boy captured a photograph of a young girl and used Artificial Intelligence to remove her clothing and make her normal image pornographic. Then he put his modified, false depiction on the internet and caused the girl great emotional distress.

In June 2025, some person or persons used AI to impersonate United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio and sent false messages to several foreign officials.

During the Sean Diddy Combs trial one of the jurors may have accessed internet information about the trial.

Can Americans rely upon their government through its legal system to afford them fair trials when false or inadmissible, unvetted information is readily available on a smart phone? The answer is, Yes! However, trial judges must apply the tools the various State Supreme Courts, Constitutions and statutes provide.

There are probably several ways for judges to approach the rapidly developing dilemmas of how jury trials are affected by Social Media. Three major theories are:

(1) The ostrich method: pretend it does not exist. Well, it does, so ignoring it will not solve it;

(2) The Luddite solution where the legal system strikes back with Draconian controls in hopes jurors will be frightened back to pre-internet behavior. Workers of the early 19^th century tried to halt mechanization in an effort to save their jobs. The Luddites who refused to adapt to the Industrial Revolution were swept into the dustbin of history; or,

(3) Adapt to the inevitable change in both technology and sociology.

State trial judges already have the education, training and legal tools to use the only rational approach to the irreversible momentum of the internet. We should call upon the lessons of thousands of years of history and our faith in our democratic system. Jurors, judges, the media and both real and artificial intelligence can operate a fair and efficient legal system using time-tested rules of due process applied with diligence and goodwill.

Technology may change but human nature has been formed over a few million years of hominoid fits and starts and two or three hundred thousand years of Homo sapiens experience and progress. And over about the past 250 years we have gone from gazing at the heavens to visiting them. Plus, over the past 100 years we have gone from curing polio and small pox to creating artificial limbs. Science has been good to us even if we take pause at the levels of death and destruction it has enabled. We just need to keep progressing before we exterminate ourselves and AI might be a huge boost in that regard.

So, how does the legal system deal with Social Media and Jurors? By remaining true to our time-tested principles and having confidence our citizens who are called for jury duty will also. As we know, people usually respond positively to positive treatment and ethically to expectations of ethical behavior. Are there plenty of bad exceptions, absolutely. However, judges have the tools to weed those potential jurors out and to guide and encourage sitting jurors to eschew extraneous influence from outside forces.

In the end, judges must adhere to their honored principles and have faith so will jurors. Most jurors want to be fair and most likely will be if judges give them proper guidance, such as the following instructions:

The parties are entitled to jurors who approach this case with open minds and agree to keep their minds open until a verdict is reached. Jurors must be as free as humanly possible from bias, prejudice or, sympathy. Jurors must not be influenced by preconceived ideas as to facts or as to law.

… Until the conclusion of this trial, do not discuss this case with any other person, including family and friends. You should not read or listen to any media discussing this case nor research this case in any way, including through the internet or any other tools of technology. Nor should you use any of these means to communicate to others about the case. It is important that this case be decided solely on the evidence you receive in this courtroom.

Progress can be a huge benefit to us. We may not now be able to see the benefits, but we should approach the future relying on our lessons from the past.

Congressman Ted Lieu of California has a college degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. Stanford is famous for having students whose parents went to jail for trying to buy their way into the school. There is no allegation that is why Lieu was accepted. It is assumed that unlike many college students Lieu actually went to class and learned something about computers, including Artificial Intelligence.

Lieu recently used his knowledge to have an Artificial Intelligence computer program draft a Congressional Resolution to regulate Artificial Intelligence. Surprise, the Resolution, “… [G]enerally expressed support for Congress to focus on AI.”

As wars rage in Ukraine and the Middle East and millions of people are in need of food, water and shelter across the globe, including California, Congress has seen fit to concentrate on the projected evils of TikTok and now AI. One has to wonder about the psyches of government officials who find danger and disaster behind such artificial issues while real humans are suffering from so many real man-made and natural disasters.

Putting government in control of AI is much more frightening to me than allowing private entrepreneurs to apply their imagination and genius to enhance technology. Such government regulation reminds me of those Luddites who during the Industrial Revolution sabotaged new textile machines out of fear the machines would replace the workers. What they found out was there were more good jobs created by the new technology than were replaced by it.

I imagine there were many such retrogressive thinkers a few thousand years ago when some cave man tinkerer showed his neighbors how he had fashioned a round thing to help him roll his possessions to a new cave. Probably to many of his fellow cavemen and cave women he was seen as a destroyer of local culture. But when the armies using wheeled chariots began to conquer those who still dragged things along, the round thing caught on.

Then about the 1930’s when plastics were becoming ubiquitous, people still stubbornly clung to lead pipes and bowls until the danger of lead and mercury were recognized. Now I am appalled by plastic trash littering our highways and our waterways. However, I do not hesitate to use plastic utensils and water pipes and reap the benefits from countless products fashioned from plastics. The fact that many people are too lazy to properly dispose of plastic refuse is not the fault of plastic. If we did not have the usefulness of plastic, trashy people would just toss out other products. Yes, plastic needs to be properly recycled and deposited but that is a behavioral problem, not a plastic one.

Humanity never advances by failing to go forward. We need to use AI, not fear it. I would rather Congress concentrate on real issues such as college athletes making millions from deals for Name, Image and Likeness while ticket prices are rising faster than stock market returns, or perhaps, such lingering issues as why we spend trillions on warfare as we attack poverty with heart-felt speeches.

Maybe AI will out smart us; it will not be that hard to do. But if AI is put in charge of problems we humans have not solved in 200,000 years, what is the worst that can happen? I say we might want to revisit that old observation from when computers first began to integrate our society. You remember, Gentle Reader, a team of scientists had just completed the world’s most advanced computer and they could not wait to ask it the age-old burning question, “Is there a god?” The computer with AI answered, “There is now.” I suggest we should not grovel before technology as if it were our god that might save us from ourselves, nor should we cower from it as though it might doom us to Hades. Humans can harness technology to help us do what we cannot do with just the talents nature gives. A nice place to start would be inventing nuclear batteries that need neither recharging nor replacing. Or how about a way to give used plastic an economic benefit such that people would not just dump it out their vehicle windows?

In other words, we should not look to AI to save us from ourselves nor fear it will punish us for trying. AI should be neither worshiped nor feared and it certainly should not be the victim of Congressional postering.

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