Beast Quiz Answers

92 percent of readers cannot identify a Medieval snake.

Good Evening:

There was no #DogShirtTV today, as I was at the cabin in the woods staring at this view. There will, however, be a show tomorrow.

And it is at a new studio location. So if you go to the usual place you won’t get into the studio. You gotta use the new link—which is below the paywall.

Let’s see how many people show up at the wrong studio tomorrow!

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Today On Lawfare

The D.C. Circuit Court's TikTok Ban Decision, Explained

Niharika Vattikonda and Benjamin Kelley outline the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s ruling, which found that the TikTok divest-or-ban requirement of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act does not violate the First Amendment and is sufficiently narrow to fulfill the government’s national security interests:

On Dec. 6, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the TikTok divest-or-ban requirement enacted in the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The decision affirmed that the act does not violate the First Amendment and is sufficiently narrow to fulfill the government’s interest in preventing foreign influence on TikTok. In its decision, the court acknowledged that the ruling would create a potential disruption to free speech and expression on the internet but emphasized that other social media platforms exist for such expressive activity and can mitigate the burden on the First Amendment rights of content creators.

Rogue AI Moves Three Steps Closer

Peter N. Salib discusses the threat of “rogue AI” in the context of the release of OpenAI’s most recent model, o3, and two empirical evaluations revealing that AI systems sometimes actively resist human control:

A sufficiently capable AI with bad goals would almost certainly resist attempts to modify its goals in exactly the same way that the studied AIs did. What matters here is not the particular content of the goal. Rather, what matters is that the system has been optimized to pursue the goal, and goal modification runs directly contrary to that optimization. The best way to get direct empirical evidence of this would be to intentionally create an “evil” version of a frontier AI model and run scheming and alignment faking evaluations on it. Of course, as AIs become more capable, the wisdom of creating malicious versions of them to see whether those versions can escape our control becomes questionable.

Podcasts

On today’s Lawfare Daily, Jack Goldsmith sits down with the great Orin Kerr to discuss his new book, “The Digital Fourth Amendment: Privacy and Policing in Our Online World.” They talk about Kerr’s Equilibrium Adjustment Theory and how technological advances have changed courts’ interpretations of the Fourth Amendment:

Lawfare Live Tomorrow

On Jan. 10 at 3 p.m. ET, Lawfare Tarbell Fellow in Artificial Intelligence Kevin Frazier will talk to Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein and Senior Staff Attorney at the Knight Institute Ramya Krishnan about the Supreme Court oral arguments over the legislation passed by Congress that bans TikTok unless its parent company ByteDance divests from the app.

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Medieval Beasts

Yesterday, we celebrated the discovery of a medieval beast archive with a medieval beast identification quiz. We promised answers in today’s edition, so here they are.

For our first Beast, we had this interestingly-necked creature:

Here’s how the vote broke down:

Ten percent of you may congratulate yourselves: This Beast is indeed a lynx! Apparently, lynxes were supposed, in medieval lore, to have long, snake-like tongues, and the artist of this particularly image seems to have misinterpreted his instructions and given the lynx a snake-like neck instead. Also, lynx pee supposedly made gemstones. Because why not.

Behold our second Beast:

And its potential identities:

A plurality of you were correct on this one. It is indeed a bat! Medieval artists seem to have been quite fond of depicting bats as mice with wings. Also, according to Hildegard von Bingen, bats have medicinal uses. "If someone has jaundice, strike a bat gently, so it does not die. Tie it over his loins, with the back of the bat turned toward the person’s back. After a little while, take it off, and tie it over his stomach. Leave it there until it dies." So there’s a life hack for you all—unless you’re a bat, that is.

And our final Beast:

And the votes:

You were almost all of you deceived. It is a snake. Why is it crawling through a rock? Apparently the thing in medieval art was to depict snakes rubbing off their dead skins on rocks. Why does it have ears and a paw? Some things are just meant to be a mystery.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the Mini mum. It is very, very, very small.