Joanna Andreasson/DALL-E4 I'm an AI developer and consultant, and when OpenAI released a preview in February of its text-to-video model Sora—an AI capable of generating cinema-quality videos—I started getting urgent requests from the entertainment industry and from investment firms. You could divide the calls into two groups. Group A was concerned about how quickly AI was going to disrupt a current business model. Group B wanted to know if there was an opportunity to get a piece of the disruptive action. Counterintuitively, the venture capitalists and showbiz people were equally split across ..read more

Here's the transcript; on balance, the message seems to me to be correct (though I would be inclined to say that such encampments, if they violate content-neutral rules—as they usually do—should be removed more promptly): Hello, everyone. As you surely know, campus communities across the country are struggling to cope with strongly contending views on the war in the Middle East – and MIT is too. So I want to let you know what I see here, and what I believe is at a stake. Last Sunday night, 30 or so students set up around 15 tents on the Kresge lawn. They also put up signs – some deeply criti ..read more

From Thursday's Tenth Circuit decision in Sun v. Xu, written by Judge John Lee and joined by Judges Diane Wood and Doris Pryor: Appellants Xingjian Sun and Xing Zhao accused their professor, Appellee Gary Gang Xu, of sexually and emotionally abusing them while the two were students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Sun and Zhao brought these allegations to UIUC administrators, and Sun later publicized them during an interview on a nationally televised morning news show {CBS This Morning}. Meanwhile, Appellant Ao Wang, a professor at Wesleyan University, learned of thes ..read more

The rise of hard seltzers across America's drinking scene is hard to miss. From tailgates to grocery store shelves, these fizzy drinks known as ready-to-drink (RTD) beverages have increased from 3 percent of the overall alcohol market a decade ago to around 12 percent today. In raw dollar amounts, the current RTD market is valued at over $36 billion and is expected to increase to just under $100 billion by 2031. But beneath the bubbly surface lies a bitter struggle over protectionism and regulatory barriers in state legislatures nationwide. A closer inspection of the fine print on these canne ..read more

4/27/1822: President Ulysses S. Grant's birthday. He would appoint four Justices to the Supreme Court: Chief Justice Waite, Justice Strong, Justice Bradley, and Justice Hunt. President Grant's appointees The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 27, 1822 appeared first on Reason.com ..read more

Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are two of the questions Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash in February at Students for Liberty's LibertyCon. Amash, the Palestinian-Syrian-American former five-term congressman from Michigan, is now running for Senate as a Republican. First elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government ..read more

National Socialist German Student League poster. (NA)   A recent viral tweet (it has 8.6 million views) inspired by controversy over anti-Israel activism on college campuses asserts that [a] good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue." Most admirers of student political activism don't go so far as to say student movements are always in the right. Still, the belief that student activists have some special claim to moral authority is nonetheles ..read more

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote an essay in The Atlantic about the protest at his home. The Dean provides more details on the facts leading up to, and during the protest. But the one paragraph towards the bottom is perhaps the most important: Overall, though, this experience has been enormously sad. It made me realize how anti-Semitism is not taken as seriously as other kinds of prejudice. If a student group had put up posters that included a racist caricature of a Black dean or played on hateful tropes about Asian American or LGBTQ people, the school would have erupted—and understandably s ..read more

Last October, I wrote a long post on a new Tenth Circuit decision, United States v. Streett, that applied the inevitable discovery exception to a defective warrant.  My post, Does the Inevitable Discovery Exception Include Imagined Revised Attempts to Get Warrants?, argued that the decision was wrong and conflicted with Supreme Court caselaw. I am pleased to learn that an excellent cert petition was filed yesterday in the case by Counsel of Record Tobias Loss-Eaton of Sidley Austin.  Here's the Question Presented: Before government agents can search a private home, the Fourth Amendm ..read more

In 1973, the Texas Legislature made "misuse of official information" a misdemeanor. The law, part of a chapter dealing with "abuse of office," applied to "a public servant" who "acquires or aids another to acquire a pecuniary interest in any property, transaction, or enterprise that may be affected by" information that "has not been made public" but to which "he has access in his official capacity." The statute also covered "a public servant" who "speculates or aids another to speculate on the basis of the information." Forty-four years later, police and prosecutors in Laredo deployed an amen ..read more