uvalawai

Schedule

Week 1 (24 August 2026)

Pre-Course Survey

Readings: (to be read before class)

• Frank H. Easterbrook, Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse, 1996 University of Chicago Legal Forum 207 (1996). [PDF]
• Ted Chiang, ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, The New Yorker, 9 February 2023. [PDF] [Original Site]

Pre-Class Assignment: Questions on readings, due 5:00pm on Thursday, 27 August.

Week 2

Post-Class Assignment: Create a Gem due 8:00pm on Tuesday, 1 September.

Pre-Class Assignment: Questions on Readings due 5:00pm on Thursday, 3 September.

Readings:

• Mark Riedl, The Intuition Behind How Large Language Models Work, Part I, Medium (Aug. 6, 2025).
• Mark Riedl, The Intuition Behind How Large Language Models Work, Part II, Medium (Aug. 13, 2025)
• Walter Spader, Memorandum of Decision: Court Sanction for Plaintiff’s Use of Prompt Injection. Docket No. AAN-CV-25-6066141-S. Superior Court, Judicial District of Ansonia/Milford at Milford. 6 August 2026.

Week 3

• Solon Barocas, Moritz Hardt & Arvind Narayanan, Fairness and Machine Learning (2023), Chapter 3: Classification, [Web Link] [PDF]

• Thomas B. Nachbar, Algorithmic Fairness, Algorithmic Discrimination, 48 Fla. St. L. Rev. 509 (2021), through end of Part I (up to p. 528) [PDF]

Week 4

• Thomas B. Nachbar, Against Transparency. [PDF (Canvas Link)]. Pre-publication version of paper to appear.

Optional additional reading:

• Aidan Cooper, Explaining Machine Learning Models: A Non-Technical Guide to Interpreting SHAP Analyses.

Week 5

• EU Made Simple, The EU’s AI Act Explained, (Sept. 21, 2024)  [YouTube Video]

• California Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act (TFAIA) , SB 53, Link. This statute is very long. You may skim most of the statute, but you should:
  • review the definition of “Artificial intelligence model” in section 22757.11(b)
  • review the definition of “Catastrophic risk” in section 22757.11(c)
  • get a good sense of the substance of section 22757.12(a) 

• Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, Exec. Order No. 14,365, 90 Fed. Reg. 58,499 (Dec. 11, 2025), Link

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) Legislation Tracker 2026: All 50 States, Multistate.ai, Link [Just browse a bit to get a sense of how much state regulation there is. We won’t be going into any detail on this.]

• Tony Romm, Dustin Volz and Michael Gold. Congress Has Plenty of Ideas to Regulate A.I. Nearly All Are Stalled, N.Y. Times (Sept. 15, 2026). [Posted in Canvas]

• How Claude’s text watermark works, Anthropic (Aug. 14, 2026). Link

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

Week 9

Week 10

Week 11

Weeks 12 and 13: Draft Presentations