So, does this mean that people can simply argue in court now (if they were to be prosecuted for downloading media via bittorrent) that it is fair use if they used it to train a local model on their machine?

To quote Brennan Lee Mulligan, "Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation."

The tone of their writing and their descriptions of the agents behavior lead me to believe they are lying about the level of direction they provided to the agent. They clearly want to appear to be more clever and ingenious than their skills will allow. They’re minimally admitting to a narrow set of actions to make it seem as if they have cleverly engineered an intelligent agent, but it too closely resembles their own personality to be anything beyond an agent that rephrases the operator’s own remarks and carried out the specific actions it was directed to do. Anything they admit to here we can safely speculate that they actually went 2-3 steps further.

“Study after study shows that money doesn't really effect the results of high-information elections“

Your earlier statement, in which you claim that “money doesn’t effect result” followed by a useless distinction of high or low info elections. You’re really trying to dance a fine line of nonsense here.

“ We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between campaign expenditure, campaign contributions and winning probability.”

From the same article you posted and the first academic journal result if you Google “studies on how money influences elections”.

That spark could end up being the rollout of chinas digital currency to the world and requiring payment using that currency when dealing with foreign businesses. This will kill the position of the US dollar as a reserve currency, slowly, but almost certainly.