AI and Legal Cases

In this episode, host Dave Humphreys (Director of AI Integration) welcomes Shawn Powers (Senior Director of AI Policy) and Evan Lowry (Senior Vice President and General Counsel) for an in-depth discussion about AI's impact on the legal system and higher education.The conversation begins with academic integrity, exploring how the landscape evolved from contract cheating to AI-enabled misconduct after ChatGPT's release. The guests discuss why AI detection tools fell short and how institutions are rethinking assessments rather than trying to create "AI-proof" tests.The discussion then shifts to AI regulation, examining recent executive actions and the tension between innovation and consumer protection. They analyze why the EU AI Act hasn't become a global model, the challenges of state-by-state regulation, and how existing legal frameworks are being tested by AI-specific cases.A deep dive into intellectual property rights covers whether AI-generated works can be copyrighted, major cases like Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence and Barts v. Anthropic (which settled for over a billion dollars), and the complexities of training models on copyrighted material.The episode concludes with fascinating questions about liability in the age of agentic AI: Who's accountable when an AI agent acts independently? Can centuries-old agency law principles apply to digital agents? And what happens when an AI goes on a legal "frolic"?