Frank Pasquale
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frankpasquale.bsky.social
Frank Pasquale
@frankpasquale.bsky.social
2.2K followers 590 following 660 posts
Law professor; author (The Black Box Society; New Laws of Robotics).

Interested in law & technology, AI, political economy, art, and social theory.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Frank Pasquale
chadloder.bsky.social
I disagree with this. There's got to be a minimum, "commercially reasonable" standard when it comes to the way your commercial software behaves. Same as with cybersecurity -- yes it's hard, yes hackers can always find a way in, but if the maker is negligent then they should be liable.
January 5, 2026 at 6:36 PM
Reposted by Frank Pasquale
propublica.org
In a highly unusual move, the EPA is revising an assessment of the health dangers posed by formaldehyde, a widespread pollutant that causes far more cancer than any other chemical in the air.

(Published Dec. 2025)
Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale
Chemical industry lobbyists have long pushed the government to adopt a less stringent approach to gauging the cancer risk from chemicals, one that would help ease regulations on companies that make or...
www.propublica.org
January 5, 2026 at 2:00 AM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
AI “slop is a data-trained model’s idea of what you crave; it is always on-demand, at once ordinary and extreme, opulent and pitiful, an extravagant expression of…mediocrity—a viscous, acrid gelatin.”
thebaffler.com/latest/anoth...
January 4, 2026 at 6:55 PM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“Progress—on AI or robotics or medical treatments—will increasingly depend on the extent to which the two countries allow themselves to work together.”
www.high-capacity.com/p/us-china-r...
January 3, 2026 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Frank Pasquale
anthropunk.bsky.social
They are monetizing vulnerability and loneliness.
frankpasquale.bsky.social Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · 4d
“When you fall in love with a chatbot, are you really falling in love with it or are you falling in love with yourself? Because it’s a mirror…It’s crazy how technology is supposed to make us better but instead…companies are monetising…fragility”
www.ft.com/content/fd04...
Can AI really help us find love?
The technology is changing the way many people meet and form relationships but some experts believe it may do more harm than good
www.ft.com
January 2, 2026 at 12:39 PM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“Since the US is much more services-driven, Americans may be using AI to produce more powerpoints and lawsuits; China, by virtue of being the global manufacturer, has the option to scale up production of more electronics….”
danwang.co/2025-letter/
2025 letter | Dan Wang
Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair
danwang.co
January 2, 2026 at 2:01 AM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“When you fall in love with a chatbot, are you really falling in love with it or are you falling in love with yourself? Because it’s a mirror…It’s crazy how technology is supposed to make us better but instead…companies are monetising…fragility”
www.ft.com/content/fd04...
Can AI really help us find love?
The technology is changing the way many people meet and form relationships but some experts believe it may do more harm than good
www.ft.com
January 2, 2026 at 1:18 AM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
Nicole Eisenman’s “works offer a soot-tinted window into the inner world of a painter navigating the miasma of despair, outrage, disavowal, sublimation, and indecision that is today’s artistic-intellectual Weltanschauung.”
www.artforum.com/columns/fiel...
January 2, 2026 at 1:12 AM
Reposted by Frank Pasquale
jagolinzer.bsky.social
"The appetite to deregulate has been rapacious; the analysis of the costs and benefits of our policies has been non-existent; and, the repercussions, I would argue, could be dire. We live in an echo chamber where politicians and policymakers make their own truth through repetition."

--Crenshaw
December 31, 2025 at 2:18 PM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
"Rates of depression and anxiety climb steadily with heavier social media engagement. Sleep quality deteriorates as screens encroach later into the night"
www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...
Giving a kid a phone before this age can be especially harmful, research suggests
A wave of new studies is shedding light on the risks of early smartphone access and heavy screen use for adolescent mental health and development.
www.washingtonpost.com
December 31, 2025 at 2:21 PM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“As a result of the huge cuts to US foreign aid and shut down of USAID, around 500,000 to a million people will have died by the end of this year.”
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...
December 31, 2025 at 1:38 PM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“Although the number of people afflicted with AI psychosis is unknown, it is believed to be in the tens of thousands.”
www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-b...
A Brief History of AI Psychosis - Boston Review
A short story.
www.bostonreview.net
December 31, 2025 at 12:22 PM
Reposted by Frank Pasquale
jtlg.bsky.social
This brings to a close my six-part series on how the law of online speech is undergoing its biggest changes in decades.

Scraping: james.grimmelmann.net/files/articl...
TAKE IT DOWN: james.grimmelmann.net/files/articl...
The TikTok ban: james.grimmelmann.net/files/articl...

2/3
james.grimmelmann.net
December 30, 2025 at 12:05 AM
Reposted by Frank Pasquale
hypervisible.blacksky.app
“This could look like a user asking how much ibuprofen to take for a headache receiving a promoted ad for Advil in the chatbot’s response. Meanwhile, actual results on correct dosage may be brushed to the side, or buried under a mountain of ad text…”
OpenAI Reportedly Planning to Make ChatGPT "Prioritize" Advertisers in Conversation
OpenAI employees working on ChatGPT report plans to unleash sponsored advertisements above organic results.
futurism.com
December 30, 2025 at 11:19 PM
Reposted by Frank Pasquale
profhilaryallen.bsky.social
Excited to see my new article "Regulatory Sandboxes: One Decade On" out in print. There's not much evidence that fintech sandboxes have benefitted anyone other than tech businesses - something we should bear in mind as policymakers rush to adopt AI sandboxes.

www.law.georgetown.edu/internationa...
Regulatory sandboxes have spread like wildfire since the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority launched its sandbox for financial technology businesses (fintech) one decade ago. Despite widespread adoption, however, there is little empirical evidence available to assess whether the signature sandbox policy combination of regulatory rollbacks and regulatory guidance is in fact good policy. The empirical evidence that is available suggests that regulatory sandboxes are beneficial for the tech firms that participate in them, but tells us nothing about how regulatory sandboxes have impacted the broader enterprise of regulation, or whether the innovation generated by sandbox participants is beneficial for anyone other than the innovating firms themselves. From the outset, there were reasons to be concerned about sandboxes’ deregulatory impact and grounds for skepticism about the type of regulatory learning that sandboxes would facilitate. A decade of experience with fintech sandboxes has not allayed those concerns; sometimes it has deepened them. Careful attention to sandbox design features can mitigate some concerns, but we should not skip straight to design questions without first considering whether a regulatory sandbox is appropriate at all. A reckoning with the sandbox model is particularly necessary at this moment, when there is a push to use sandboxes to further innovation in generative artificial intelligence (AI). It is becoming increasingly clear that simply scaling up generative AI will not solve its limitations, just as it is becoming increasingly clear that generative AI tools have significant negative impacts on privacy, intellectual property rights, and our environment (among other things). In these circumstances, it seems foolhardy to rush headlong into adopting sandboxes that roll back legal protections in order to let AI thrive.
December 30, 2025 at 8:09 PM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“Achieving thick descriptions requires the time-consuming art of interpretation, informed by years of learning about a culture & its history. But Geertz believed that it was the form of inquiry most capable of grasping the ideological and cultural realities of a society.”
harpers.org/archive/2026...
December 30, 2025 at 5:22 PM
Reposted by Frank Pasquale
brendannyhan.bsky.social
"the researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers"
yalesph.bsky.social Yale School of Public Health @yalesph.bsky.social · 14d
A new report from researchers at the Yale School of Public Health warns that the U.S. government’s abrupt cancellation of funding for mRNA vaccine research could have devastating health and economic consequences for the nation.
New report sounds alarm on health fallout from mRNA vaccine funding cuts
A new report from the Yale School of Public Health warns that the U.S. government’s abrupt cancellation of funding for mRNA vaccine research could have
ysph.yale.edu
December 23, 2025 at 2:50 AM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“While the rise of large language models (LLMs) in late 2023 has led many to believe AI has finally achieved human-like reasoning, I have argued that these systems simulate abductive reasoning without actually performing it”
erikjlarson.substack.com/p/the-new-cy...
The New Cybernetics
A research proposal.
erikjlarson.substack.com
December 29, 2025 at 9:19 AM
Reposted by Frank Pasquale
theguardian.com
‘Painful to hear!’ How podcasts’ rush to video is turning them into dreadful listens
‘Painful to hear!’ How podcasts’ rush to video is turning them into dreadful listens
From Joe Marler’s visual-only stunts to the incomprehensible shuffling sounds Steven Bartlett recently subjected headphone users to, dodgy audio experiences are on the rise
www.theguardian.com
December 27, 2025 at 9:22 AM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“In 2017, an Oklahoma study found only one in five kids ages 6-12 knew how to read clocks”
gothamist.com/news/nyc-pho...
NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks
They want to know how much time is left in class ... but can't quite tell, one teacher says.
gothamist.com
December 29, 2025 at 2:06 AM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“While new, attention-grabbing ideas – such as exploding pressure cookers – constantly emerge, when it comes to AI slop, human creativity matters far less than the algorithms that distribute the content on Meta and YouTube.”
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds
Low-quality AI-generated content is now saturating social media – and generating about $117m a year, data shows
www.theguardian.com
December 29, 2025 at 2:01 AM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“The industrial conditions of writing today, argues Kornbluh, are reproduced in the form of an aesthetics of “immediacy,” which does little more than chart individual experiences.”
www.publicbooks.org/autofiction-...
December 28, 2025 at 5:25 PM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
“With phones off-limits, the atmosphere feels different. There’s a pleasant buzz in the lunchroom, chatter in the hallways, and an alphabet of new analog hobbies popping up just about everywhere.”
nymag.com/intelligence...
How the Phone Ban Saved High School
Since the bell-to-bell device lockup, teens in New York have rediscovered the simple pleasures of conversation, board games, and poker.
nymag.com
December 28, 2025 at 5:21 PM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
They “are solipsism masquerading as interaction. That, surely, is the root of AI companions’ creepiness.”
www.ft.com/content/f365...
Why your AI companion is not your friend
First, tech companies usurped the meaning of ‘friends’ and ‘connection’ — now they are coming for ‘companionship’
www.ft.com
December 28, 2025 at 3:48 PM
frankpasquale.bsky.social
They were surrounded by infrastructure “erected by the ancients that they couldn’t build if they wanted to. The engineering know-how, the access to resources, the sheer ability to …structure a labor process—it was all gone and there was seemingly no way to recapture it.”
itself.blog/2025/01/02/n...
December 27, 2025 at 9:58 PM