Kimberly Gross Kimberly Gross

UPDATE! State Privacy Laws and VPD

Just about a year ago, we posted “A Privacy Rights Road Trip: How Do State Privacy Laws Impact Vehicle Performance Data (VPD)?” in which we considered how the five states that had enacted data privacy laws at that time had addressed privacy rights in and to the type of personal data increasingly captured by our cars. On March 28, Iowa became the sixth state to enact a comprehensive data privacy law—meaning our privacy rights road trip needs an update.

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Kimberly Gross Kimberly Gross

Human vs. AI: Who will ultimately win the content creation battle?

OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, which debuted in November, has quickly become a viral sensation especially in the field of content creation. GPT-4, the language model that powers the latest version of ChatGPT, has been popping up more and more frequently as the real author behind content generated for myriad wide-ranging audiences. But is AI really ready to render content writers obsolete by generating high-quality content at the click of a button?

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Kimberly Gross Kimberly Gross

Thoughts from the Driver’s Seat with Mike Nelson

Whooooo Hit the Brakes?

The term “phantom braking” may conjure up images of ghosts and goblins, but it is hardly a seasonal phenomenon. It a technical sense, according to CMU Professor Phil Koopman as quoted by The Washington Post, phantom braking occurs when “the developers do not set the decision threshold properly for deciding when something is there versus a false alarm.” In a more basic sense, phantom braking is what happens when a car’s automated driving system suddenly and unexpectedly slams on the brakes because it incorrectly senses a collision hazard.

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Kimberly Gross Kimberly Gross

Should We Recall the Automotive Safety Recall?

In September of last year, Elon Musk publicly objected to NHTSA’s continued use of the term “recall” in connection with automotive issues that can be—and routinely are—fixed through over the air software updates, tweeting that “the terminology is outdated and inaccurate.” This was not the first time Musk raised such objections, nor even the first time Musk raised such objections on Twitter. Indeed, almost a decade ago, Musk responded to a recall of certain 2013 Model S vehicles due to a perceived fire risk by tweeting that “the word ‘recall’ needs to be recalled.” The issue has percolated up again in the first few months of this year as NHTSA announced (1) a recall of FSD, which affects hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles on the road, and which Tesla plans to address via an over-the-air update, and (2) a recall of certain Model Y vehicles to correct defective passenger seat bolts, which cannot be corrected “over the air.”

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