artificial intelligence — Online Journal — Columbia Undergraduate Law Review

Surveillance Beyond Borders: How Courts Can Check the Power of AI Within the Immigration System

With the development of artificial intelligence (AI), what once was a technology of the obscure and distant future has now become part of our daily lives. From digital assistants and chatbots to social media platforms and search algorithms, AI has expanded into our reality. It has been implemented in fields ranging from healthcare and banking to analytics. Now, it is increasingly being implemented within the immigration system. Within the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), AI algorithms are used to analyze facial expressions, inspect fingerprints and faces, and survey remote border crossings. Its usage has transformed how countries like the United States are managing their inflow of migrants and asylum seekers. Yet, the quickness with which AI has been applied within the immigration system, both within the United States and internationally, dangerously threatens the privacy rights of citizens and non-citizens alike.

Ella HummelAugust 17, 2025immigration, artificial intelligence, human rights, privacy rights

A New Age of Publicity: The NO FAKES Act and Federal Regulation on AI Replicas

In an age dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), the entertainment industry has evolved to reflect the capacity of new technologies to alter, enhance, or replicate human performances. As actors earn Oscars for AI-assisted performances and bands win Grammys for AI-generated music, questions have arisen concerning the future of art as human creation. The past several years have seen several lawsuits filed, contracts revised, and restrictions set in an attempt to regulate AI usage in the industry. One such effort, the 2024 Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act, was recently introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives as an endeavor to protect actors’ and performers’ likenesses from the misuse of deepfake technology. While preemptive state laws and agencies like the U.S. Copyright Office support the creation of a national standard for restrictions on AI, the proposed legislation, as outlined in the current version of the NO FAKES Act, would encroach upon First Amendment rights protecting freedom of speech in digital spaces as interpreted and enforced by the current administration.

Kate GivenAugust 17, 2025Copyright law, artificial intelligence, entertainment law, right of publicity

Extending Corporate Tort Liability to Social Media Algorithms

In September 2021, whistleblower reports about social media platforms’ use of artificial intelligence (AI) that promote certain platform content over others raised critical questions about the relationship between AI algorithms and corporate liability standards. Facebook consistently claims that AI is an “efficient” and “proactive” means to stop hate speech and other problematic content on its platform. However, internal documents reveal that AI removes less than ten percent of harmful content, such as hate speech or misinformation, from the platform.

Metaverse: The End of Privacy As We Know It?

The Metaverse aims to blur the distinction between reality and virtual worlds to create an unprecedented extended reality (XR) universe for human social interactions. A revolutionary proposal by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, the Metaverse consists of a network of three-dimensional virtual worlds where people can interact with others using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies to work, learn, and socialize.