Richard Stevens

Richard W. Stevens is a retiring lawyer, author, and a Fellow of Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley Center on Natural and Artificial Intelligence. He has written extensively on how code and software systems evidence intelligent design in biological systems. Holding degrees in computer science (UCSD) and law (USD), Richard practiced civil and administrative law litigation in California and Washington D.C., taught legal research and writing at George Washington University and George Mason University law schools, and specialized in writing dispositive motion and appellate briefs. Author or co-author of four books, he has written numerous articles and spoken on subjects including intelligent design, artificial and human intelligence, economics, the Bill of Rights and Christian apologetics. Available now at Amazon is his fifth book, Investigation Defense: What to Do When They Question You (2024).

Archives

Did China’s DeepSeek Violate OpenAI’s Legal Rights?

_{“Distillation” technology may have allowed DeepSeek to piggy-back on ChatGPT to capture market share}_{Richard W. Stevens
February 5, 2025}

The complex legal wrangle continues but, in general, I would advise against treating AI products as legally equivalent to human products.

The Human Body From an Engineer’s Perspective

_{My late father was a naval engineer. There are fundamental ways an engineer must think about any designed system. Let’s apply them to the body}_{Richard W. Stevens
February 2, 2025}

The design of the human body, as Your Designed Body (2022) shows, offers many times more complex challenges than those of a ship.

TikTok Is Not Just Overgrown Chatting and Email

_{Foreign adversary’s AI-empowered threats to national security tip Supreme Court scales against TikTok}_{Richard W. Stevens
January 23, 2025}

Social media like TikTok today interconnect active speakers and active viewers in all directions. The system monitors and stores all the communications, extracting volumes of data for each individual user. In China where the law allows it, the government can scan and analyze not only the speakers and viewers but can also retrieve specific facts about all of them. The government can restrict messages based upon speaker, viewer, and content — and use AI to craft and send personalized, tailored messages aiming to influence users’ buying and voting decisions, not to mention their psychological well-being. TikTok and the First Amendment Broad-band internet services, multi-billion-dollar social media, and expanding central government are merging into a muscular octopus of …

Can AI Really Code the Value of Humans?

_{The new book Soulless Intelligence urges that we program all AI systems to treat all humans as infinitely valuable – the only exceptions being criminals and aggressors}_{Richard W. Stevens
January 16, 2025}

The life-and-death challenge we face is how to ensure that AI systems never “take over” or even make recommendations and decisions that endanger humans.

First Federal Report on Drone Sightings Flunks Credibility Test

_{Whether reports are human- or AI-generated, they need careful scrutiny}_{Richard W. Stevens
December 18, 2024}

The December 16 report raised more questions than answers. The December 17 report offered more information but there was still too much “Take our word for it!”

Sci-Fi Becomes Real: Killer Robot Dogs

_{They are just one manufacturing cycle away}_{Richard W. Stevens
December 10, 2024}

Except for the fact that Boston Dynamics' “Spot” does not wield a gun, it has the same capabilities as the dog in Metalhead. And a gun could be fitted privately.

How To Sue A Chatbot For Causing Suicide

_{If your child committed suicide because an online chatbot effectively encouraged him to do so, could you sue the chatbot makers?}_{Richard W. Stevens
November 1, 2024}

Sewell killed himself at the urging of a speaking and texting chatbot. The next gen is nearly flawless human impersonation video bots. Protect your children.

California Censorship Law Loses First Round in Legal Battle

_{Court zeroes in to protect First Amendment rights to vigorous political speech and expression}_{Richard W. Stevens
October 4, 2024}

Unless deepfake technology is outlawed wholesale, the collection of piecemeal laws and regulations aiming to fix this or that problem will grow without limit.

California: The New “Deepfakes” Ban Violates the First Amendment!

_{Outrage over the AI-generated imitations of Kamala Harris’s voice distracts from the issues around the state’s power grab over media}_{Richard W. Stevens
September 24, 2024}

AB 2839 targets political speech, the most protected form of expression under the First Amendment. There are 7 meritorious challenges

Richard Stevens on All Things AI and Law

_{Richard W. Stevens and Robert J. Marks
August 29, 2024}

In this episode, lawyer and Mind Matters News contributor Richard W. Stevens is on the show to discuss the legal issues and challenges around copyright, fair use, and the use of copyrighted material by AI systems. They discuss the implications of a recent Supreme Court case, Warhol vs. Goldsmith, that tackles the legal concepts of “derivative work” and “transformative work.” Host Robert Marks and Stevens discuss how the case could affect other cases involving artificial intelligence. The conversation also touches on the broader tensions between property rights in information/data and public access, and how AI is affecting the legal landscape around copyright and ownership in the digital age. Additional Resources “How to Stop Troubling Abuse From …

Yes, the Billion-Records Data Breach Is Real

_{My family and I were victims. Here’s how to find out if you are too and what you can do about it}_{Richard W. Stevens
August 26, 2024}

AI systems could analyze the huge database of stolen identities to refine their knowledge and attempt thousands of data breaches daily.

Google Decision Challenges Trillion-Dollar Internet Gatekeeper

_{How one company cornered the market for the human mind}_{Richard W. Stevens
August 9, 2024}

The judge ruled that Google operates unlawfully: It effectively excludes competitors while its prices and services are unresponsive to consumer market demands.

The Dark Art of Online “Nudging”: How to Protect Yourself

_{Organizations of all kinds use psychological tricks to move our minds as we browse — but a handy acronym helps detect them}_{Richard W. Stevens
July 31, 2024}

The FORCES acronym helps us sense when a website, app, news report, or video source is nudging us to think and act in ways that perhaps we hadn’t expected.

Attention: Mind Matters News Has Been Prebunked!

_{ChatGPT-4 produced attacks on Mind Matters News, aimed at people who had never heard of it (prebunking), based only on the About page and the Introduction}_{Richard W. Stevens
May 28, 2024}

Journalists who advocate prebunking to discourage audiences from seeing alternative information are helping propagandists defeat the search for truth.

Economics Assumes Human Beings Have Free Will

_{Every waking moment we humans live out a constant fact underlying all economic science: we act.}_{Richard W. Stevens
May 2, 2024}

“Free will denial is a cornerstone of materialist–determinist ideology,” wrote Dr. Michael Egnor here in February 2024. The deniers say we are “purely physical machines, meat robots.” Dr. Egnor cited well-known people who have prominently denied humans have free will. Dr. Egnor challenged deniers to demonstrate through their own actions that they truly have no free will. They will fail for Dr. Egnor’s stated reasons, plus one more: economics. The science of economics describes the behaviors of individual humans as they pursue their lives. Economics has discovered certainties, such as the Law of Supply and Demand, that describe how people produce, consume, trade, save, invest, and anticipate the future. Economics succeeds because it grasps certain universal truths about …

Deep Fake Videos Can Upgrade Political Humiliation and Rule by Fear

_{AI human impersonation video technology promises rule by terror to degrees never before imagined}_{Richard W. Stevens
April 13, 2024}

When propaganda is easily generated, millions fully embrace their inability to know the truth. They can’t so it doesn’t matter and never will.

Are Chatbots Biased? The Research Results Are In

_{The results are obvious and dramatic. Inject the preferred training materials and the chatbot will “believe” whatever the post-trainer intended}_{Richard W. Stevens
April 2, 2024}

People have noticed political biases in artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot systems like ChatGPT, but researcher David Rozado studied 24 large language model (LLM) chatbots to find out. Rozado’s (preprint) paper, “The Political Preferences of LLMs,” delivers open access findings from very recent research, and declares: When probed with questions/statements with political connotations, most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses that are diagnosed by most political test instruments as manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints. The Chatbots’ Landslide of Opinion As reported in the New York Times, the paper restates that “most modern conversational LLMs when probed with questions with political connotations tend to generate answers that are … …