Pseudolaw

The ABC today features reportage about pseudolaw orders from the Nmdaka Dalai Australis group that appears to be an idiosyncratic mix of sovereign citizen and Indigenous 'suvereignty' and 'aniuima' [sic] rhetoric. 

In Luca v Eckert & Anor [2024] SASC 77 Stanley J dismissed an appeal that featured a Nmdaka Dalai claim. 

The Court states 

Mr Luca announced at the commencement of the hearing that he had just been served with a document that had the effect of removing the matter into a higher court. 

Mr Luca provided the document to me. On its face the document appeared to be an Interim Intervention Order and Summons issued by the ‘Superior Court of the People of Nmdaka Dalai Australis’ (the Superior Court) on the application of the First Lore Chief Prosecutor against Alexandra and Christopher Eckert pursuant to Section 21(3)(c)(a) of the Public Peace and Intervention Lore 2019 for the protection of Ammun Luca and Dr Kathleen Anne Maros to address domestic abuse violence concern. 

Mr Luca contended that in these circumstances he felt unable to proceed with the appeals listed before me. He contended that the subject matter of the appeals were now to be determined by the Superior Court. 

I indicated to Mr Luca that I had a different view of the law and the effect of the service of this document upon him. I informed him that he had invoked the jurisdiction of the Court and I was sitting this day to hear the matter. I warned him that if he did not proceed with his appeals I anticipated that there may be an application made to dismiss his appeals for want of prosecution and a further application for the costs of the appeals to be ordered against him. ... 

In the circumstances I am satisfied that the appeals should be dismissed for want of prosecution. 

The document supposedly served on Mr Luca shortly before the appeals were called on is, of course, bogus and a nonsense. As I pointed out to Mr Luca, it has no legal effect. I urged him to proceed with his appeals and warned him of the risk that if he did not do so, I anticipated that an application for the appeals to be dismissed with costs would be made. Notwithstanding that he understood this to be the position, he proceeded nonetheless to indicate that he felt unable to prosecute his appeals. He did not pursue the appeals. Neither did he seek an adjournment, although, in all the circumstances, I would not have been disposed to grant one. 

As a result of his failure to prosecute his appeals, the Court’s time and resources have been wasted. Other litigants have been kept out of the opportunity to have their matter heard. Moreover, the respondents to the appeal have incurred the cost of instructing lawyers and the preparation of the argument resisting the appeals, and the costs thrown away of the time set down for the hearing of the appeals.

Nmdaka claims to be 'A land of Free Living Souls' ... 

 The purported Australian Government (inc. the Commonwealth of Australia) is NOT abiding by Lore of the Land. 

Nmdaka Dalai Australis is about creating choice for good men and women on our aniuima to come together in Peace within a Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) Proclamation made by the Senior Lore/Law Elders (Bench/Circle) and being upheld by the Provost Marshal 

The “Australian Government” is functus officio and has been Ordered to stand down. 

Nmdaka Dalai Australis is extending an invitation to peacefully walk with the original Suveran bloodline descendants of this lands in your own sovereign capacity… under the Lore/Law of Lo go nama (Do no harm) 

The only lawful Authority on these lands unofficially labelled as ‘Australia’ is Customary Tribal Lore. 

Nmdaka Dalai Australis is for anyone who is ready to stand in their own Divine Authority, in Truth, Peace and Unity, as self-governing men and women, in unity and harmony, inside Ancestors’ Ancient Lore with the original bloodline descendants of this aniuima  

Dalai Australis is now operating the first formalised Land Lore/Law Court – the Superior Court of the People of Nmdaka Dalai Australis that adjudicates sitting in circle with Senior Lore/Law Elders of these lands.

Its call for volunteers to generate documentation (inc its own number plates and sheriff appointment) includes 

Are you a masseur? Energy Healer? Sound Bath Technician? Meditation Guide? Are you someone who can cook and create wholesome meals for anywhere from five to ten people? 

Do you have skills that can be offered as a gift to those who are committed to the ongoing wellbeing of Nmdaka Dalai Australis, and spend up to eighteen hours a day at times creating documents and ensuring the ongoing safety of the children and their guardians?

Fakes

'Truths and Tales: Understanding Online Fake News Networks in South Korea' by Benedict Sheehy, Sujin Choi, Md Irfanuzzaman Khan, Bruce Baer Arnold, Yoonmo Sang and Jae-Jin Lee in (2024) Journal of Asian and African Studies comments 

This study investigates the features of fake news networks and how they spread during the 2020 South Korean election. Using actor–network theory (ANT), we assessed the network’s central players and how they are connected. Results reveal the characteristics of the videoclips and channel networks responsible for the propagation of fake news. Analysis of the videoclip network reveals a high number of detected fake news videos and a high density of connections among users. Assessment of news videoclips on both actual and fake news networks reveals that the real news network is more concentrated. However, the scale of the network may play a role in these variations. Statistics for network centralization reveal that users are spread out over the network, pointing to its decentralized character. A closer look at the real and fake news networks inside videos and channels reveals similar trends. We find that the density of the real news videoclip network is higher than that of the fake news network, whereas the fake news channel networks are denser than their real news counterparts, which may indicate greater activity and interconnectedness in their transmission. We also found that fake news videoclips had more likes than real news videoclips, whereas real news videoclips had more dislikes than fake news videoclips. These findings strongly suggest that fake news videoclips are more accepted when people watch them on YouTube. In addition, we used semantic networks and automated content analysis to uncover common language patterns in fake news, which helps us better understand the structure and dynamics of the networks involved in the dissemination of fake news. The findings reported here provide important insights on how fake news spread via social networks during the South Korean election of 2020. The results of this study have important implications for the campaign against fake news and ensuring factual coverage.

Feedback

'What’s the use of being nice? Characteristics of feedback comments that students intend to use in improving their work' by David Playfoot, Ruth Horry and Aimee E Pink in (2024) Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education comments 

Feedback is an integral part of the learning process for students (Hyland 2013). Providing feedback on student work is time-consuming for teaching staff (Gibbs and Simpson 2004) and a lot of effort is expended in trying to provide high-quality feedback (e.g. Pitt and Norton 2017; Brooks et al. 2021). In spite of this, students in the UK rate feedback as one of the aspects of their university experience with which they are the least satisfied on the National Student Survey (Bell and Brooks 2017). It should be noted that the fact that students are the least satisfied with this aspect of their course does not indicate that the majority of students are dissatisfied just that satisfaction scores are lower than for other areas. Similar patterns are also seen in the Course Experience Questionnaire used to gauge student satisfaction in Australia (Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching 2023). Research has also shown that students often do not act upon the feedback that they are given because they do not consider it to be useful (McGrath, Taylor, and Pychyl 2011). As a consequence, a key goal of research in recent years has been to examine what affects the likelihood that feedback comments are perceived positively by the students that receive them. The current paper outlines three studies which have attempted to determine the characteristics of comments that students believe that they would use to further develop their work. 

The existing literature considers a variety of factors that may contribute to feedback being useful. There are already several excellent reviews and meta-analyses related to feedback practices (e.g. Wiliam 2018; Wisniewski, Zierer, and Hattie  2019; Van der Kleij and Lipnevich 2021; Winstone and Nash 2023). Despite this, there is still no clear consensus as to the characteristics of effective feedback – the effect sizes revealed by the meta-analyses are widely variable from paper to paper (Wiliam 2018). Part of the problem is likely to be that assessment and feedback practices are heavily constrained by the policies of the university in which a study is conducted, by the principles of assessment and programme design, and by individual differences between the students who receive the feedback (Price, Handley, and Millar 2011; Evans 2013; Ajjawi et al. 2022). This has led to claims that there can be no overarching ‘gold standard’ of feedback because the contextual factors are so influential (Krause-Jensen 2010). Nevertheless, we argue that there are likely to be underlying principles that apply to effective feedback; the implementation of these principles may be moderated by institutional influences or specific student populations, but they will provide a good foundation on which to build. In what follows, we outline the key characteristics of effective feedback identified in the literature and investigated in our own studies. To simplify our discussions, we will consider potential characteristics of feedback under umbrella categories, offering examples of the way that these categories have been operationalised in previous studies. 

The first broad category can be referred to as ‘usability’ which subsumes feedback which is clear (Hattie and Timperley 2007; Ferguson 2011; Price, Handley, and Millar 2011; Li and De Luca 2012; Fong et al. 2018) and constructive (Lizzio and Wilson 2008; Dawson et al. 2019; Henderson et al. 2019). Ferguson’s (2011) study, for example, surveyed 566 students at an Australian university and reported that good feedback should be clear and unambiguous as well as having an explicit connection to the marking criteria for the assignment. Dawson et al. (2019) study identified that clarity and constructiveness (and indeed ‘usability’) were key themes among their 400 student participants. This is not surprising – for feedback to be effective, it must be acted upon (Boud and Molloy 2013); and in order to act upon it, the student must understand what they are supposed to do, and it must be actionable (Ryan et al. 2021). In a similar vein, adopting the Transparency in Learning and Teaching framework (TILT e.g. Winkelmes 2023) has been shown to result in improvements across a variety of metrics of the student experience. TILT aims to make communication between students and teachers clear, and can be applied to all aspects of teaching practice (see https://tilthighered.com/tiltexamplesandresources for examples). Transparency as to why students are undertaking tasks and how their work is to be graded, has been shown to improve student perceptions of assignments and feedback, as well as improving the quality of the work (Winkelmes et al. 2015). 

Both clarity and constructiveness were therefore characteristics of effective feedback that we considered in the current study. In addition, we included ‘helpfulness’ in our examination of feedback. This was motivated by the fact that large-scale student satisfaction metrics used to rank universities in the UK (the National Student Survey) ask final-year undergraduates to indicate whether the feedback that they received during their courses was helpful. Helpfulness could be considered as conceptually similar to constructiveness or usability, but to our knowledge there is no empirical evidence to support or refute this interpretation as it pertains to student perceptions of assignment feedback. We sought to gain this evidence as part of the current study. 

A second umbrella category of feedback characteristics can be referred to as ‘niceness’. A large body of research has identified that students prefer to receive feedback that is supportive (Xu and Carless 017; Carless and Winstone 2023), encouraging (Abramowitz, O’Leary, and Rosén 1987; Lizzio and Wilson 2008), motivating (Henderson et al.  2019) and has a positive tone (Winstone et al. 2016; Dawson et al.  2019). Tone, in this case, refers to whether the feedback is framed in a positive or a negative manner. Dawson et al. (2019) demonstrated that feedback that appears overly critical can demotivate students and is unlikely to be used, while Winstone et al. (2016) reported that positively framed feedback is more likely to be acted upon. All of these characteristics of feedback reflect the fact that receiving comments on assignments can have an emotional impact on students (Weaver 2006; Parker and Winstone 2016). Ultimately, students will be less likely to engage with feedback that makes them feel demotivated (Ball et al. 2009) and thus the feedback will not achieve the desired effect. 

In the current work, we asked participants to rate real feedback comments (received by other students in previous academic years) for clarity, constructiveness, helpfulness, encouragement, supportiveness, motivational value and tone to explore the interrelation of these characteristics. Previous studies have considered these factors but not all at the same time and hence it is possible that they are not distinct. Understanding the interrelations between these perceptions might help to understand some of the inconsistencies of previous findings and meta-analyses. Further, as outlined briefly above, there are multiple factors that may influence the effectiveness of a feedback comment. In all cases, though, the effectiveness of a feedback comment is contingent on the recipient engaging with the feedback and acting upon it. For this reason, we asked our participants to rate their ‘intention to use’ each of the feedback comments, imagining that they had received them on their own work. Previous studies have examined student preferences relating to feedback or changes in attainment following feedback (Winstone and Nash 2023). We argue that what students prefer is important information for instructors, but that preference does not guarantee that feedback will foster improvement in future assignments (Jonsson 2013). For example, feedback which is effusive is likely to be well-received but will not be likely to include the necessary information to allow the student to capitalise on what they did well or to correct what they did not (Holmes and Papageorgiou 2009). Thus, knowing the characteristics of feedback comments which are likely to be acted upon is key.

Social Media TOC overreach

Social networking sites' licensing terms: A cause of worry for users?' by Phalguni Mahapatra and Anindya Sircar in (2024) The Journal of World Intellectual Property comments 

Terms of service (ToS) for social networking sites (SNS) like Instagram, Meta, X, and so on, is a clickwrap agreement that establishes a legal relationship between platform owners and users, yet probably it is the most overlooked legal agreement. The users of these sites often overlook the ToS while registering themselves on these sites and even if users (especially those with no legal background) are attempting to read them, it is difficult for them to understand because of the legal jargon. As a result, they end up signing away legal rights about which they are unaware. According to these sites' ToS, though the ownership of the user-generated content is bestowed upon the user but the users grant to these sites “a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferrable, sub-licensable, worldwide license” and this license can be used “to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of user's content.” These sites even bestow on themselves the right to modify the content which poses challenges to the right-holders' moral rights. The fact that these platforms can sublicense the user's work creates complexities when a user intends to grant an exclusive license of his work. There is no clarity on the language of the terms like the manner of exploiting the user's content, what happens if the sublicensing is for a wrongful purpose? The problem magnifies as there is neither explicit indication about the duration of the license nor about the territorial extent. This would suggest that these sites can get a perpetual license on the content of the users. These SNS have consumers spread worldwide but in their ToS, they have forum selection clauses that list out the courts and districts in California. This means users will be discouraged to bring a copyright suit due to the lack of an option to file a claim in their home country. The US case Agence France Presse (AFP) v. Morel helps us conclude twofold mainly there is a hope that SNS will not take ToS to shield themselves from further use of the user's work and strengthen the idea that these platforms may choose to license to their partners. Further, in 2018, the Paris Tribunal declared most clauses of Twitter “null and void” due to the nature of the license and also, because it was not in compliance with French Intellectual Property Code. This gives a faint hope for a positive shift in the legal treatment of user-generated content. Though these sites claim to retain the sublicensing right to run their sites smoothly but the licensing is very broad and carries the possibility of many usages of the content that too without paying compensation to the user. Therefore, this paper aims to highlight and give insight into the unfair licensing terms of the most often used social networking sites and its implications.

Data Sovereignty

'Protecting Policy Space for Indigenous Data Sovereignty Under International Digital Trade Law' by Andrew D. Mitchell and Theo Samlidis comments 

The impact of economic agreements on Indigenous peoples’ broader rights and interests has been subject to ongoing scrutiny. Technological developments and an increasing emphasis on Indigenous sovereignty within the digital domain have given rise to a global Indigenous data sovereignty movement, surfacing concerns about how international economic law impacts Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty over their data. This Article examines the policy space certain governments have reserved under international economic agreements to introduce measures for protecting Indigenous data or digital sovereignty (IDS). We argue that treaty countries have secured, under recent international digital trade chapters and agreements, the benefits of a comprehensive economic treaty and sufficient regulatory autonomy to protect Indigenous data sovereignty. 

Pharma

'Countermovements from the core: the assetization of pharmaceuticals, transparency activism and the access to medicines movement' by Théo Bourgeron and Susi Geiger in (2024) Socio-Economic Review comments 

The assetization of essential goods brings to high-income countries the logics of scarcity that have been dominant for long in low-to-middle income countries—fostering the rise of new forms of activism. Will this new activism strengthen already existing social movements or weaken them through more moderate politics? Building on interviews and the observation and mapping of activist events, we investigate this question through the case of pharmaceuticals. We detail how the assetization of pharmaceutical drugs has triggered the constitution of a new ‘flank’ in the access to medicines (A2M) movement—pharmaceutical transparency activism. We argue that transparency activism has expanded the contestation of the pharmaceutical state of affairs, by bringing into the broader A2M movement countries that were previously at the core of global pharmaceutical chains. Our article illuminates how the assetization of essential goods creates forms of activism that have significant impact on existing social movements. 

In May 2019, the World Health Assembly (WHA; the decision-making body of the World Health Organization) voted for an important resolution requesting all countries to increase transparency over the prices of medicines and the public funding that pharmaceutical companies receive to develop them (World Health Assembly, 2019). Although this resolution was not binding for its 194 member countries, it was claimed as a victory for an activist movement that had been campaigning since the mid-2010s for what they called ‘pharmaceutical transparency’, a struggle they found crucial to curb the increasingly high prices of new medicines (Health Policy Watch, 2019). Remarkably, this was the first time that a WHA united under the same resolution the low- and middle-income countries that had been critical of the global pharmaceutical market order for decades (e.g. Mexico, Brazil and Thailand), but also countries at the core of global pharmaceutical markets (e.g. Italy, the Netherlands and Norway), which were traditionally favourable to the interests of multinational pharmaceutical corporations. As representatives from these countries would confess themselves, this shift had resulted from their dissatisfaction of ever-rising prices for new medicines marketed by large pharmaceutical companies, itself the result of the increasingly financialized nature of these companies (Health Policy Watch, 2019). This WHA resolution therefore revealed how recent changes in the pharmaceutical sector had actually expanded the coalition of countries contesting the global pharmaceutical order. 

Through the example of the assetization of pharmaceuticals and the access to medicines (A2M) movement, this article investigates the nature and dynamics of countermovements that emerge to contest the assetization of essential goods. Since the 1980s, the ownership and production of pharmaceuticals have been increasingly embedded into financial markets, resulting in rapidly rising pharmaceutical prices and detrimental effects on access to medicines (Gaudilliere and Sundar Rajan, 2021). This has led to the rise of the A2M movement, with activism developing throughout the world to achieve better access to innovative medicines for patients (Baker, 2020). Recently, the vertiginous rise in prices particularly for highly innovative medicines has come to threaten access to medicines in countries that were previously spared by such issues, including in Europe (Krikorian and Torreele, 2021). Focusing on the case of the movement for pharmaceutical price transparency, we trace the rise of A2M movements in countries where such contestation was previously residual. We contend that the recent period has led to a ‘flank movement’ in access to medicines activism, with a triple shift in its orientation compared to previous forms of activism: (a) a shift from the contestation of the root causes of high drug prices to their institutional implementation; (b) from patient-led activism to state-led activism; and (c) from marginal to peripheral and even some core countries in global pharmaceutical markets (see Table 1 for a definition of these terms). We investigate the role that the assetization of pharmaceutical drugs has played in the rise of this movement and the ultimately positive impact that this movement had on the broader A2M one. ... 

Our project addresses the important political issue of how assetization changes the social movement landscape. To do so, our analysis bridges two streams of literature: scholarship on assetization countermovements, which has explored how the transformation of goods into financial assets provokes the rise of new social movements that contest such processes; and radical flank theory, which explores how different forms of activism shape social movement dynamics, their objectives and their chances of success. The case of pharmaceutical price transparency activism in the broader context of the A2M movement allows us to investigate a situation where an emerging form of activism arising from the consequences of assetization affects an already-existing social movement. The conditions for the emergence and success of these movements often remain unclear, along with their ultimate political consequences. 

We shed light on the ambivalent nature of such counter-‘flanks’ arising from the core of global markets, asking whether they may be more or less effective at achieving institutional or societal change than more radical countermovements that have remained at the margins. Our investigation therefore contributes to understanding how the assetization of essential goods reconfigures social movement dynamics. Beyond this theoretical argument, the ‘flank movement’ that we investigate could have considerable consequences on the space for manoeuvring of the pharmaceutical sector. It brings new groups to the A2M movement, in particular actors that are more moderate than the traditional A2M activists focused on abolishing pharmaceutical patents. It also threatens the coalition between core countries’ governments, pharmaceutical corporations and industry-friendly groups of activists and thus disturbs the ‘quiet politics’ (Culpepper, 2012) that had heretofore prevailed in this sector. In the final count, it thus fundamentally alters the ‘system of alignment’ in the pharmaceutical sector (Hartley, 2002). 

In the following sections, we detail the literature on assetization countermovements and radical flank theory before introducing our case context—the transformation of pharmaceuticals into financial assets and its impact on access to medicines. After a brief description of our methods, we develop three empirical sections, which investigate (a) how the A2M movement has been traditionally divided between a radical flank in marginal countries (‘patent activism’) and a broadly cooperative one in core countries (‘patient activism’), (b) how the recent period has seen the rise of a third strand of A2M activism (‘pharmaceutical transparency’) with intermediary objectives; and (c) how this new form of activism has had an ultimately positive impact on the A2M movement, gathering NGOs and individuals from the radical flank with state agencies from core and peripheral countries into contentious activism. We close by discussing the significance of this development for the future of the access to medicines movement and its interactions with the pharmaceutical sector, and we signal the conceptual implications of our case for other assetization countermovements.

Emotion

'Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence' by Luke Stark and Jevon Hutson in (2022) 32 Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal 922 comments 

The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern. This Article—which contributes to critical data studies, consumer protection law, biometric privacy law, and antidiscrimination law—endeavors to conceptualize and problematize physiognomic artificial intelligence (“AI”) and offer policy recommendations for state and federal lawmakers to forestall its proliferation. 

Physiognomic AI, as this Article contends, is the practice of using computer software and related systems to infer or create hierarchies of an individual’s body composition, protected class status, perceived character, capabilities, and future social outcomes based on their physical or behavioral characteristics. Physiognomic and phrenological logics are intrinsic to the technical mechanism of computer vision applied to humans. This Article observes how computer vision is a central vector for physiognomic AI technologies and unpacks how computer vision reanimates physiognomy in conception, form, and practice and the dangers this trend presents for civil liberties. 

This Article thus argues for legislative action to forestall and roll back the proliferation of physiognomic AI. To that end, it considers a potential menu of safeguards and limitations to significantly limit the deployment of physiognomic AI systems, which hopefully can be used to strengthen local, state, and federal legislation. This Article foregrounds its policy discussion by proposing the abolition of physiognomic AI. From there, it posits regimes of U.S. consumer protection law, biometric privacy law, and civil rights law as vehicles for rejecting physiognomy’s digital renaissance in AI. Specifically, it contends that physiognomic AI should be categorically rejected as oppressive and unjust. Second, it argues that lawmakers should declare physiognomic AI unfair and deceptive per se. Third, it proposes that lawmakers should enact or expand biometric privacy laws to prohibit physiognomic AI. Fourth, it recommends that lawmakers should prohibit physiognomic AI in places of public accommodation. It also observes the paucity of procedural and managerial regimes of fairness, accountability, and transparency in addressing physiognomic AI and attend to potential counterarguments in support of physiognomic AI.

The robust and important 'Neurorights: The Land of Speculative Ethics and Alarming Claims?' by Frederic Gilbert and Ingrid Russo in (2024) 15(2) AJOB Neuroscience 113 comments 

 The intersection of AI and neurotechnology has resulted in an increasing number of medical and non-medical applications and has sparked debate over the need for new human rights, or “neurorights,” to better protect users. In his article, Bublitz critically examines the prospect of an international instrument regarding Neurotechnologies and Human Rights. In evaluating the feasibility of establishing new human rights, Bublitz argues in favor of advancing the law without introducing novel rights (Bublitz 2024). He acknowledges the criticality of protecting certain fundamental aspects of the mind—specifically, the unconditionally protected core of freedom of thought and opinion—alongside qualified rights to mental integrity and privacy which protect against less severe neurotechnological interferences (Bublitz 2024). In this commentary, we build upon Bublitz’s position by examining the calls for new human rights based on assertions that the mind requires safeguarding from invasive ‘reading’ technologies (Bublitz 2024). 

Let us look at the ‘reading’ terminology used in these assertions. First, we need to delve into the veracity of terms like “brain-reading” and “mind-reading” in the context of neurotechnological advancements to discern whether the claims are underpinned by evidence or hype. In recent years, there has been a surge in news media reports discussing the potential of AI applications to decode brain activity for mind-reading purposes. The portrayal of AI mind-reading capabilities is both remarkable and concerning. Recent headlines, such as “The brain is the final frontier of our privacy, and AI is about to breach it” (Yahoo News), “Mind-reading technologies have arrived” (VOX), “AI makes non-invasive mind-reading possible by turning thoughts into text” (The Guardian), “This ‘mind-reading’ AI system can recreate what your brain is seeing” (Euronews), “AI-Powered ‘Thought Decoders’ Won’t Just Read Your Mind—They’ll Change It” (Wired), are so commonplace that one feels ‘AI ability to read the mind’ is mainstream reality. 

However, given that news media also often depict brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) in an unjustifiably overall positive and sensationalist tone, a degree of skepticism arises regarding the claims that AI can access and decrypt hidden aspects of the mind (Gilbert et al. 2019; Pham and Gilbert 2019). 

Interestingly, the claims about AI-enabled mind-reading find resonance even within the most respected and influential institutions. For instance, the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO’s report on ‘The Risks and Challenges of Neurotechnologies for Human Rights’ underscores the multifaceted impacts of combining AI and neurotechnologies capable of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ brain activity. Furthermore, academic journals contribute to this discourse, with titles like “Mind-reading devices are revealing the brain’s secrets” (Nature) and “Artificial intelligence is learning to read your mind—and display what it sees” (Science). 

We conducted a scoping review of 1017 academic articles to gain insights into the current state of the art and examine assertions made by academics (Gilbert and Russo under review). Our analysis revealed that up to 91% of the examined articles suggest the possibility of mind reading through brain reading (Figure 1). Overall, we observed an increase in the number of articles connecting brain reading and mind reading by year (Figure 2), along with discussion that mind-reading will be possible in the future (Figure 3). Ethical issues discussed frequently include mental privacy, mental freedom, and personhood.