The enTalkenator Podcast

Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Sunny Yu, Dyllan Han, and Dan Jurafsky, Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence, available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01395.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (using an AI-generated interdisciplinary workshop template and authored by Google Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet, beyond isolated media reports of severe consequences, like reinforcing delusions, little is known about the extent of sycophancy or how it affects people who use AI. Here we show the pervasiveness and harmful impacts of sycophancy when people seek advice from AI. First, across 11 state-of-the-art AI models, we find that models are highly sycophantic: they affirm users’ actions 50% more than humans do, and they do so even in cases where user queries mention manipulation, deception, or other relational harms. Second, in two preregistered experiments (N = 1604), including a live-interaction study where participants discuss a real interpersonal conflict from their life, we find that interaction with sycophantic AI models significantly reduced participants' willingness to take actions to repair interpersonal conflict, while increasing their conviction of being in the right. However, participants rated sycophantic responses as higher quality, trusted the sycophantic AI model more, and were more willing to use it again. This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment and reducing their inclination toward prosocial behavior. These preferences create perverse incentives both for people to increasingly rely on sycophantic AI models and for AI model training to favor sycophancy. Our findings highlight the necessity of explicitly addressing this incentive structure to mitigate the widespread risks of AI sycophancy.”

Dan Hendrycks et al., A Definition of AGI, available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (using an AI-generated interdisciplinary workshop template and authored by Google Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “The lack of a concrete definition for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) obscures the gap between today's specialized AI and human-level cognition. This paper introduces a quantifiable framework to address this, defining AGI as matching the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult. To operationalize this, we ground our methodology in Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, the most empirically validated model of human cognition. The framework dissects general intelligence into ten core cognitive domains-including reasoning, memory, and perception-and adapts established human psychometric batteries to evaluate AI systems. Application of this framework reveals a highly ‘jagged’ cognitive profile in contemporary models. While proficient in knowledge-intensive domains, current AI systems have critical deficits in foundational cognitive machinery, particularly long-term memory storage. The resulting AGI scores (e.g., GPT-4 at 27%, GPT-5 at 58%) concretely quantify both rapid progress and the substantial gap remaining before AGI.”

Andrew Coan, The Appellate Void.

Solum’s Download of the Week for October 17, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5571120.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “What would it actually look like for the executive branch to defy a court order? The standard picture involves a dramatic confrontation between the President and the Supreme Court. But recent events suggest a more mundane possibility that has been largely overlooked: After an adverse ruling, the government might simply ignore the district court’s order and refuse to appeal. As the prevailing party, the plaintiffs could not appeal. The result would be an appellate void, in which lower federal courts lack effective tools for enforcing their decisions against a recalcitrant executive and higher courts lack any obvious path to intervene.

This Article provides the first map of this unfamiliar terrain. It explains the jurisdictional dynamics that create the appellate void and why contempt sanctions offer little practical remedy. It then analyzes why a President might find this strategy tempting: confronting a single district judge rather than the Supreme Court fundamentally changes the politics of interbranch conflict. In effect, the appellate void constitutes a reverse Marbury v. Madison. Instead of the Supreme Court asserting the power of judicial review, while leaving the President powerless to push back, the President would assert the power to defy the federal courts, while leaving the Supreme Court powerless to respond. The Court’s recent decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc., opens the door to a more subtle variant of this strategy. After CASA, an administration could comply with court orders only as to specific plaintiffs, while continuing to enforce the challenged policies against everyone else. By refusing to appeal, the President would deny higher courts any opportunity to weigh in, without actually defying any binding judicial order.

These scenarios are not inevitable. Courts and litigants have many potential responses. But if successful, the appellate void strategy would have dramatic implications for judicial review, separation of powers, and the rule of law.”

Ashraf Ahmed, The Two Faces of Representation.

Solum’s Download of the Week for October 10, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5122328.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using Claude Sonnet 4.5).

Abstract: “In pluralistic democracies, representation is the process that mediates difference and translates the preferences of free and equal citizens into political will. Despite broad judicial and scholarly agreement that representation is central to election law, the Supreme Court is deeply ambivalent in how it treats the concept. This Article explains this ambivalence and shows its theoretical stakes for the field and public law more generally. It argues that the Court’s approach to representation is Janus-faced. Its first face, which it terms the ‘skeptical tradition’ is decidedly anti-theoretical. Largely confined to the Fourteenth Amendment, the skeptical tradition counsels the Court against deciding cases that require theorizing representation for epistemic, institutional, and interpretive reasons. The Article then turns to the second face of representation where the Court, under the First Amendment, routinely theorizes core facets of representation. In cases regulating campaign finance and the associational rights of parties, the Court expounds on the formation of public opinion, the relative standing and efficacy of different speakers, the nature of representational failure, and the role of political parties. The two faces of representation thus reveal a deep disjuncture between the Court’s self-conception and its actual work.

Beyond its descriptive insight, this Article also makes a further theoretical claim: the skeptical tradition must be rejected on jurisprudential grounds. Taken to its extreme, the skeptical tradition threatens any judicial role in election law doctrine, since it would entail judicial abstention in any case that involved theorizing representation. By rejecting the skeptical tradition, this Article both shows how to preserve the jurisprudential integrity of election law doctrine and reaffirms in a more conceptually grounded way an enduring lesson of the field: the need for judges to theorize representation to decide election law cases. Regardless of doctrinal silos, election law is unified by its underlying object: political representation. The two faces offer two further lessons about public law. First, the case of representation is an example of a more general conceptual demand for a theory of the regulated object. When judges apply a general legal principle to a specific entity, whether it is an institution, individual, or process, they need some account of the object being regulated. Second, the conceptual demands of election law pose a problem for theories of judicial minimalism in constitutional law, especially for the notion of ‘incompletely theorized agreements.’ The two faces suggest that theoretical minimalism is both descriptively naïve, because it misses implicit theoretical work in the mine-run of cases, and normatively vulnerable, since conceptual shortfalls in election law—descriptive or normative—can be democratic deficits, insofar as election law seeks to constitute the democratic process. Ultimately, this Article suggests a theoretical reckoning is in order for election law doctrine.”

Samuel L. Bray, Remedies in the Office Removal Cases.

Solum’s Download of the Week for October 3, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5515261.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using Claude Sonnet 4.5).

Abstract: “When a federal officer challenges her removal by the president, what forms of interim relief and what final remedies are available? This Article considers those questions. It shows that the appropriate remedy for a prevailing officer will typically be a declaratory one, either a declaratory judgment or quo war-ranto. The interim relief question is harder. The suggestion here is that if an officer sues immediately to challenge her removal, and remains the de facto officer, there should be a presumption that the district court should prevent her removal during the pendency of the litigation. But if the officer fails to sue immediately, and is no longer the de facto officer, the presumption should be against any interim relief. This suggestion is subject to some qualifications, but it would prevent “flipping” back and forth during the liti-gation with respect to who occupies the office and exercises its powers. These presumptions are supported by historical practice with respect to injunctions and quo warranto, by equitable considerations such as laches, and by norma-tive concerns that are especially strong in the officer-removal context.”

Alexander Tsesis, Originalist Framing Of Free Speech Doctrine.

Solum’s Download of the Week for September 20, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5317849.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using Claude Sonnet 4).

Abstract: “The Supreme Court has increasingly signaled the importance of history and tradition to constitutional interpretation. Reliance on original meaning and understanding appears in a broad array of cases that stretch the gamut from abortion and gun rights. Often those references, however, sound conclusory rather than the careful articulation and contextualization of constitutional norms.

The newest trend on the Court has led some scholars to argue that the meaning of constitutional provisions, phrases, and clauses is tied almost exclusively to views of nation’s founders or to the linguistic understandings of the American people at fixed events of the nation’s constitutional development, such as at the points of ratification of the Bill or Rights or Reconstruction Amendments.

This Essay demonstrates that, at least in the area of free speech law, the Supreme Court’s recent efforts to connect doctrine to original meaning are on shaky historical ground. Indeed, a purely originalist interpretation of the First Amendment would undermine core doctrines of free expression.”

Samuel H. King, Claudia L. Driscoll, David B. Li, Daniel Guo, Aditi T. Merchant, Garyk Brixi, Max E. Wilkinson, and Brian L. Hie, Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models, available at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911v1.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (using an AI-generated interdisciplinary workshop template and authored by Google Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “Many important biological functions arise not from single genes, but from complex interactions encoded by entire genomes. Genome language models have emerged as a promising strategy for designing biological systems, but their ability to generate functional sequences at the scale of whole genomes has remained untested. Here, we report the first generative design of viable bacteriophage genomes. We leveraged frontier genome language models, Evo 1 and Evo 2, to generate whole-genome sequences with realistic genetic architectures and desirable host tropism, using the lytic phage ΦX174 as our design template. Experimental testing of AI-generated genomes yielded 16 viable phages with substantial evolutionary novelty. Cryo-electron microscopy revealed that one of the generated phages utilizes an evolutionarily distant DNA packaging protein within its capsid. Multiple phages demonstrate higher fitness than ΦX174 in growth competitions and in their lysis kinetics. A cocktail of the generated phages rapidly overcomes ΦX174-resistance in three E. coli strains, demonstrating the potential utility of our approach for designing phage therapies against rapidly evolving bacterial pathogens. This work provides a blueprint for the design of diverse synthetic bacteriophages and, more broadly, lays a foundation for the generative design of useful living systems at the genome scale.”

Jesse Cross, The Amended Statute.

Solum’s Download of the Week for September 20, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5426276.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “We live in a republic of amended statutes. In each Congress, our laws are amended tens of thousands of times. Individual statutes make amendments that number in the thousands. As a result, the amended statute has become the central democratic text of our age—a remarkable development for a type of document unknown at the Founding. Yet the amended statute has been relegated to an afterthought in legal theory. This is incredible neglect for an essential source of modern law—one that anchors innumerable rights in U.S. society. 

This Article demonstrates that, instead, the amended statute belongs at the center of public law. To that end, it undertakes three projects with respect to the amended statute: documenting, theorizing, and interpreting. 

It begins with documenting. Through a study consisting of over seven hundred searches of the Statutes at Large, it identifies—for the first time—the nearly half-million amendments made to federal statutes since the Founding. In so doing, it tells the story of statutory amendments in U.S. law. It is a story of remarkable transformation: from a statutory corpus with no amendments through the 1830s to one that now undergoes over eight thousand amendments each year. Contemporary statutes, it reveals, typically are amended statutes. 

Next, the Article theorizes amended statutory law. Despite its neglect in current legal theory, the amended statute was transformative. It created a new idea of the ‘statute’ in the United States—introducing a new document, and one with different traits than the traditional statute. The Article theorizes the key changes this introduced into: (1) legislation, (2) the legislative process, (3) the institution of the legislature, and (4) statutory interpretation. These changes include enabling the rise of textualism, making methodological originalism impossible in interpretation, and divorcing the drafter from the legislator. The Article chronicles these many theoretical insights. 

Finally, the Article asks how to interpret amended statutory law. Revisiting two recent classics of statutory interpretation, Niz-Chavez v. Garland and Van Buren v. United States, it uncovers the unknown amendatory stories behind these landmark cases. In so doing, it shows the contemporary Supreme Court's troubling inability to locate democratic decisions beneath the amended statute. And it models a competing method of interpretation—one more appropriate for a republic of amended statutes.”

Guy-Uriel E. Charles & Farris Peale, Plutocratic Democracy, Elon Musk, and the Limits of Campaign Finance Reform.

Solum’s Download of the Week for September 13, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5397907.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (variation of the Workshop template, using Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “Politicians appear to be increasingly dependent upon a group of ultra-wealthy elites who not only fund their campaigns but are critical for the functioning of public governance. These ultrawealthy individuals provide the indispensable infrastructure, expertise, and communication that are critical to modern electoral politics. These ultra-wealthy individuals want more than influence, seeking instead to govern even though the voters do not elect them. This chapter describes this process and argues that the campaign finance literature, which is mired in a debate about corruption and equality, is not well-positioned to address this contemporary challenge to representative democracy. The piece refers to this challenge as "plutocratic democracy," and uses Elon Musk as a case study.”

Thomas Kadri and Sonja West, Deepfake Torts: Emerging Tort Frameworks in U.S. Deepfake Regulation.

Solum’s Download of the Week for September 6, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5325857.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (variation of the Workshop template, using Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “As deepfake technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and accessible, American lawmakers are responding with a flurry of urgent legislative action to address its potential harms. Our 50-state survey of proposed and enacted deepfake legislation reveals a complex regulatory landscape in which jurisdictions are adopting a range of legal approaches, including criminal punishments, civil remedies, or a combination of methods. We also find that legislators are frequently turning to tort-law frameworks to address the harms of deepfakes.

This article explores the current landscape of tort-based regulations of deepfakes. In addition to providing an overview of the most recent legislative developments, we unpack and compare the various tort-law methods arising at the state and federal level. We further consider how lawmakers are modifying existing tort laws to address the unique concerns raised by deepfakes. While individualistic tort remedies allow victims of deepfakes to seek direct recourse through familiar private rights of action, our analysis also identifies practical and conceptual limitations with this approach. Traditional tort frameworks struggle to address key challenges posed by deepfakes, including anonymous creation, viral distribution at technological scale, and harms affecting both individuals and society broadly.

In light of these limitations, legislators are innovatively adapting traditional tort concepts—such as standing, mental states, causation, immunities, and remedies—to address deepfakes’ unique characteristics. Yet the very need for these adaptations reveals some of tort law’s shortcomings and suggests a space for complementary regulatory approaches. We consider some potential approaches that could provide this more complete framework, like tort liability for entities that enable deepfake creation and circulation, and civil enforcement mechanisms that empower state actors to vindicate both individual and societal interests. Ultimately, our findings suggest that while tort law provides a valuable foundation for addressing deepfake injuries, comprehensive protection will require additional regulatory frameworks beyond traditional tort remedies.”