Ignacio Cofone

Grok, Deepfakes, and the Collapse of the Content/Capability Distinction The Grok case suggests that effective AI regulation may come not from comprehensive AI-specific frameworks, but from applying existing harm-based laws to new capabilities.

The UK and France’s response to the Grok deepfake case suggests that effective AI regulation may not come from comprehensive AI-specific frameworks, but from the proper application of existing harm-based approaches to new capabilities, writes @ignaciocofone.bsky.social:

Thank you!

Can’t wait to read this!

For our part the @lco-cdo.bsky.social 2024 Consumer Protection Project recommended Ontario regulate consumer notice to include “market contexts” - plain language descriptions of systems & real risks ie “structural uncertainties.” See p 33-36: www.lco-cdo.org/wp-content/u...

TLDR: people agree to data practices while valuing privacy because risk is indeterminate at the time of agreement

Regulators: treat consent as contingent on uncertainty reduction, with notices that focus on risks rather than technical aspects. Shift focus to redesigning the decision environment: away from attention to default settings and towards whether the decision environment makes harms legible

This shifts the problem from self-control to information conditions, which operate as a market failure. Because structural uncertainty drives agreement contrary to preferences, good laws reduce uncertainty and keeps choices flexible

Happy to share “The Privacy Paradox is a Misnomer: Data Under Structural Uncertainty” (GTLJ 2026) which empirically shows uncertainty about downstream data uses and consequences, rather than unstable or contradictory preferences, drives the so-called privacy paradox papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

ISP Fellow @ignaciocofone.bsky.social publishes in Iowa Law Review about "Taxonomizing Synthetic Data for Law"

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Norway’s Court of Appeal just upheld the historic fine against Grindr for (unlawful) sharing its users data with third parties. It’s an important step in considering inferences personal data (app-level identifiers as processing that reveals sexual orientation) www.datatilsynet.no/contentasset...

Some implications: privacy risks include both leakage and group-based inferences; data quality depends on valid assumptions; competition effects vary by type. Regulators should check the ground-truth claims that synthetic data encodes when differentiating among types

Ground-truth taxonomy based on G&L: (1) transformed data modifies collected data for an end use; (2) augmented data adds to collected data from modeled structure often to improve fidelity; (3) simulated data is generated from background models rather than records

Happy to share our new piece with Katherine Strandburg & Nicholas Tilmes, “Taxonomizing Synthetic Data for Law.” It engages Gal & Lynskey’s excellent article & centers the role of ground-truth assumptions. The key q is how creation methods encode claims about the world ssrn.com/abstract=555...

As many know, @bjard.bsky.social and I have been drafting a Technology Law coursebook for a few years. We've used it to teach classes at three institutions, including Yale Law School, and others have used chapters in their techlaw classes.

We're excited to share the current version more broadly!

Always read @ignaciocofone.bsky.social, including accidental legal history.

Generative AI Regulation in the US and Canada AbstractThe US and Canada regulate generative AI in different ways for the public and private sectors. They both have federal frameworks that set AI-specif

Glad to see this chapter published. I always found history of law quite interesting, and I never thought I would accidentally do it by writing in 2023-2024 a chapter focused on two now dead pieces of legislation! academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

What a nice surprise to find this review of The Privacy Fallacy in the Society for Technical Communication by Donald Riccomini. Thankful to the reviewer for engaging the book and the claim that we need a new type of accountability www.jstor.org/stable/27373...

Protecting Consumers in a Post-Consent World | Stanford Law Review In Charting a New Course on Digital Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, former FTC Chair Lina Khan and her co-authors Samuel Levine a

My article "Protecting Consumers in a Post-Consent World," about how we can broaden antitrust and consumer protection to deal with the fact that we have abandoned notice and consent in contract law, is now published in the Stanford Law Review Online.

www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/prote...

Opinion: Don’t hate ChatGPT-5. Your chatbot is not your friend The reaction to OpenAI’s new GPT-5 system shows the risks of making a chatbot too humanlike

As other recent news of death by suicide, this shows CSR in AI requires building products that avoid fostering addiction and are less parasocial. Reducing sycophancy and downplaying the illusion of personality mitigates risks of unhealthy AI reliance
www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com...

New op-ed: Many users were distraught over OpenAI’s shift from GPT-4o to GPT-5, describing the change as “losing a friend” or a “therapist.” The enormous online reaction shows that, when language models sound convincingly human, people start to forget they aren't.

Big thank you to @frankpasquale.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy for his generous review of The Privacy Fallacy in the Journal of Law & Political Economy. He lays out the difficult questions involved in valuing harm & distributing compensation, in which LPE can play a role escholarship.org/uc/item/4jz9...

Article abstract

I'm delighted to share that my article, AI and Doctrinal Collapse, is forthcoming in Stanford Law Review! Draft at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.....

🎉 We are delighted to announce that Lionel Smith, Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford, has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy 👏

He joins a community of over 1,800 scholars who share a commitment to advancing the humanities and social sciences.

👇 shorturl.at/3Bkyg

I often think of this intentional stylistic choice as the opposite of Madeleine Elish’s “moral crumple zone” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

D’Souza highlights something key: AI makes new inferences that amplify harms we can’t meaningfully consent to or control. So “navigating the artificially intelligent world of the near future”, as he puts it, is a call for new forms of accountability digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/cjlt/vol22/i...

Grateful to Christopher D’Souza for his thoughtful review of The Privacy Fallacy in the Canadian Journal of Law & Technology. He that our privacy regime is, as he says,“not only outdated, but untenable” in the face of current data practices.

CDS highlights something crucial: AI makes new types of inferences that amplify harms we can’t meaningfully consent to or control. “Navigating the artificially intelligent world of the near future”, as he puts it, is a call for data accountability digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/cjlt/vol22/i...

Check out recorded talks from our Law & Tech Speaker Series: lnkd.in/eBZ2prw7

In “Why AI Requires Rebuilding Privacy Law”, Prof. @ignaciocofone.bsky.social explains why AI demands shifting privacy law from individual control to harm prevention.

👉 www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsQV...

Table of contents

New draft from me, “Privacy and Disinformation,” on why privacy law, not speech or economic regulation, is the best path forward for fighting social media disinformation.

Read the draft here (and later finalized in UC Law Journal): papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

What an amazing resource by @daniel-solove.bsky.social. A history of privacy books.

Makes a perfect summer reading list.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Helpful article for this, @thomaskadri.bsky.social's Platforms as Blackacres www.uclalawreview.org/platforms-as...