Considering the Human Rights Impacts of LLM Content Moderation
At Tech Policy Press we’ve been tracking the emerging application of generative AI systems in content moderation. Recently, the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL) released a comprehensive report titled Algorithmic Gatekeepers: The Human Rights Impacts of LLM Content Moderation, which looks at the opportunities and challenges of using generative AI in content moderation systems at scale. Justin Hendrix spoke to its primary author, ECNL senior legal manager Marlena Wisniak.
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Protecting Privacy and Dissent in an Age of Authoritarianism and AI
Helen Nissenbaum, a philosopher, is a professor at Cornell Tech and in the Information Science Department at Cornell University. She is director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, which was launched in 2017 to explore societal perspectives surrounding the development and application of digital technology. Her work on contextual privacy, trust, accountability, security, and values in technology design led her to work with collaborators on projects such as TrackMeNot, a tool to mask a user's real search history by sending search engines a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, and AdNauseam, a browser extension that obfuscates a user’s browsing data to protect from tracking by advertising networks. Building on such projects, in 2015, she coauthored a book with Finn Brunton called Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest. The book detailed ideas on mitigating and defeating digital surveillance. With concerns about surveillance surging in a time of rising authoritarianism and the advent of powerful artificial intelligence technologies, Justin Hendrix reached out to Professor Nissenbaum to find out what she’s thinking in this moment, and how her ideas can be applied to present day phenomena.
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Interrogating Tech Power and Democratic Crisis
If you’ve been reading Tech Policy Press closely over the last three weeks, you may have come across one or more posts from collaboration with Data & Society called “Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis.” The articles in the series examine how powerful tech billionaires and authoritarian leaders and thinkers are leveraging AI and digital infrastructure to advance anti-democratic agendas, consolidate control, and reshape society in ways that threaten privacy, labor rights, environmental sustainability, and democratic governance. For this episode, Justin Hendrix spoke to four of the authors who made contributions to the series, including:Jacob Metcalf, program director of the AI On the Ground Initiative at Data & Society;Tamara Kneese, program director of the Climate, Technology and Justice program at Data & Society;Reem Suleiman, outgoing US advocacy lead at the Mozilla Foundation and member of the city of Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission; and Kevin De Liban, founder of TechTonic Justice.
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Through to Thriving: Honoring Our Elders with Dr. Timnit Gebru
For a special series of episodes dubbed Through to Thriving that will air throughout the year, Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli is hosting discussions intended to help us imagine possible futures—for tech and tech policy, for democracy, and society—beyond the moment we are in.The third episode in the series features her conversation with Dr. Timnit Gebru, the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. Last year, Dr. Gebru wrote an New York Times opinion that asked, “Who Is Tech Really For?” In the piece, she also asked, “what would an internet that served my elders look like?” This year, DAIR has continued to ask these questions by hosting an event and a blog called Possible Futures that imagines “what the world can look like when we design and deploy technology that centers the needs of our communities. In one of these pieces, Dr. Gebru, along with her colleagues Asmelash Teka Hadgu and Dr. Alex Hanna describe “An Internet for Our Elders.”
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AI Companions and the Law
Concerns about AI chatbots delivering harmful, even profoundly dangerous advice or instructions to users is growing. There is deep concern over the effects of these interactions on children, and a growing number of stories—and lawsuits—about when things go wrong, particularly for teens. In this conversation, Justin Hendrix is joined by three legal experts who are thinking deeply about how to address questions related to chatbots, and about the need for substantially more research on human-AI interaction: Clare Huntington, Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law at Columbia Law School;Meetali Jain, founder and director of the Tech Justice Law Project; and Robert Mahari, associate director of Stanford's CodeX Center.
Tech Policy Press is a nonprofit media and community venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. The Sunday Show is its podcast.
You can find us at https://techpolicy.press/, where you can join the newsletter.
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