The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Today is the three month anniversary of the vicious Hamas attack and abduction of hostages that ignited the current war in Gaza. Just before the New Year, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) published a report titled “Distortion by Design: How Social Media Platforms Shaped Our Initial Understanding of the Israel-Hamas Conflict.” This week, Justin Hendrix spoke to the report’s authors— Emerson T. Brooking, Layla Mashkoor, and Jacqueline Malaret— about their observations of the role that platforms operated by X, Meta, Telegram, and TikTok have played in shaping perceptions of the initial attack and the brutal ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza, which now continues into its fourth month. “Evident across all platforms,” they write, “is the intertwined nature of content moderation and political expression—and the critical role that social media will play in preserving the historical record.”

In a report released December 20, 2023, the Stanford Internet Observatory said it had detected more than 1,000 instances of verified child sexual abuse imagery in a significant dataset utilized for training generative AI systems such as Stable Diffusion 1.5. This troubling discovery builds on prior research into the “dubious curation” of large-scale datasets used to train AI systems, and raises concerns that such content may contributed to the capability of AI image generators in producing realistic counterfeit images of child sexual exploitation, in addition to other harmful and biased material. Justin Hendrix spoke the report’s author, Stanford Internet Observatory Chief Technologist David Thiel.

If you’ve listened to some of the dialogue in hearings on Capitol Hill about how to regulate AI, you’ve heard various folks suggest the need for a regulatory agency to govern, in particular, general purpose AI systems that can be deployed across a wide range of applications. One existing agency is often mentioned as a potential model: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But how would applying the FDA work in practice? Where does the model break down when it comes to AI and related technologies, which are different in many ways from the types of things the FDA looks at day to day? To answer these questions, Justin Hendrix spoke to Merlin Stein and Connor Dunlop, the authors of a new report published by the Ada Lovelace Institute titled Safe before sale: Learnings from the FDA’s model of life sciences oversight for foundation models.

At the end of this year in which the hype around artificial intelligence seemed to increase in volume with each passing week, it’s worth stepping back and asking whether we need to slow down and put just as much effort into questions about what it is we are building and why. In today’s episode, we’re going to hear from two researchers at two different points in their careers who spend their days grappling with questions about how we can develop systems and modes of thinking about systems that lead to more just and equitable outcomes, and that preserve our humanity and the planet:Dr. Batya Friedman is a Professor in the Information School and holds adjunct appointments in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, the School of Law, and the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington, where she co-directs the Value Sensitive Design Lab and the UW Tech Policy Lab.Dr. Aylin Caliskan is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, is an affiliate of the UW Tech Policy Lab, part of the Responsible AI Systems and Experiences Center, the NLP Group, and the Value Sensitive Design Lab. She is also co-director elect for the Tech Policy Lab, a role she will assume when Dr. Friedman retires from the university.

In April 2021, the European Commission introduced the first regulatory framework for AI within the EU. This Friday, after a marathon set of negotiations, EU policymakers reached a political consensus on the details of the legislation. This AI Act represents the most significant comprehensive effort in the world’s democracies to regulate a technology that promises major social and economic impact. While the AI Act will still have to go through a few final procedural steps before its enactment, the contours of it are now set. To find out more about what was decided, Justin Hendrix spoke to one journalist who reported directly on the negotiations in Brussels: Luca Bertuzzi, technology editor at EURACTIV.

In both the US and Europe, policymakers are making important decisions about the governance of the bulk collection of communications and data for intelligence purposes. In the US, some of these questions are at the fore as Congress considers how to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's Section 702 program, which is set to expire at the start of 2024. To get a sense of how the broader policy debate around government surveillance is advancing in both the US and Europe, Justin Hendrix spoke to two experts on the subject who happened to be meeting together in Washington DC last week: Dr. Thorsten Wetzling, head of the Digital Rights, Surveillance and Democracy research unit of the Berlin think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV), and Greg Nojeim, Director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

For the past two years, there has been a steady stream of news out of Kenya about the relationships between major tech firms – including Meta, TikTok and OpenAI – and outsourcing firms like Sama and Majorel that have employed content moderators on their behalf. In the spring of this year, more than 150 moderators announced the formation of the African Content Moderators Union, which advocates for better pay and working conditions, and a lawsuit against Meta is working its way through Kenya’s courts. This month will see an important ruling in that case. To learn more about the situation on the ground and what it’s been like for the individuals involved in this fight while the legal progress unfolds, Justin Hendrix spoke to Njenga Kimani, a researcher at Siasa Place, a youth-led, prodemocracy NGO based in Nairobi, and three moderators who’ve worked on platforms including TikTok, Meta, and OpenAI: James Oyange Odhiambo, Sonia Kgomo, and Richard Mathenge.

To learn more about the recent leadership crisis at OpenAI and what lessons policymakers should take from it, Justin Hendrix spoke to Karen Hao, a contributing writer at The Atlantic who is currently working on a book about OpenAI. With staff writer Charlie Warzel, Hao wrote a piece for The Atlantic under the headline "Inside the Chaos at OpenAI," drawing on conversations with current and former employees of the company.

On November 15, the Open Markets Institute and the AI Now Institute hosted an event in Washington D.C. featuring discussion on how to understand the promise, threats, and practical regulatory challenges presented by artificial intelligence. Justin Hendrix moderated a discussion on harms to artists and creators, exploring questions around copyright and fair use, the ways in which AI is shaping the entire incentive structure for creative labor, and the economic impacts of the "junkification" of online content. The panelists included Liz Pelly, a freelance journalist specialized in the music industry; Ashley Irwin, President of the Society of Composers & Lyricists; and Jen Jacobsen, Executive Director of the Artist Rights Alliance.

This episode explores Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose its Harmful Secrets, a new book by Wall Street Journal technology reporter Jeff Horwitz. His relentless coverage of Meta, including first reporting on the documents brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen in the fall of 2021, has been pivotal in shedding light on the complex interplay between social media platforms, society, and democracy. Justin Hendrix talks to him about his journey, new details revealed in the book, and the impact his reporting has had in driving platform accountability both in the United States and internationally. 

Today's guest is Dr. Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of the new book, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York, just out from Duke University Press. Guariglia says we're really living in a world of police surveillance built in the early 20th century, even as police departments wield powers that only a few years ago we thought might only be in the hands of federal intelligence agencies.

Today’s guest is Wiebke Hutiri, a researcher with a particular expertise in design patterns for detecting and mitigating bias in AI systems. Her recent work has focused on voice biometrics, including work on an open source project called Fair EVA that gathers resources for researchers and developers to audit bias and discrimination in voice technology. Justin Hendrix spoke to Hutiri about voice biometrics, voice synthesis, and a range of issues and concerns these technologies present alongside their benefits.

Today’s guest is Ravi Iyer, a data scientist and moral psychologist at the Psychology of Technology Institute, which is a project of the University of Southern California Marshall School’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He is also a former Facebook executive, and at the company he worked on a variety of civic integrity issues. The Neely Center has developed a design code that seeks to address a number of concerns about the harms of social media, including issues related to child online safety. It is endorsed by individuals and organizations ranging from academics at NYU and USC to the Tech Justice Law Project and New Public, as well as technologists that have worked at platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Justin Hendrix spoke to Iyer about the details of the proposed code, and in particular how they relate to the debate over child online safety.

At the September G20 summit in Delhi, the government of prime minister Narendra Modi promoted the country’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) as a model for the world for how to develop digital systems that enable countries to deliver social services and provide access to infrastructure and economic opportunities to residents. Other world leaders were enthusiastic about the pitch, endorsing a common framework for DPI systems. But even as an Indian vision for DPI appears to be attractive beyond that country’s borders, what are the ideas and events that shaped India’s approach? Today's guest is Mila Samdub, a researcher at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who recently published an essay titled “The Bangalore Ideology: How an amoral technocracy powers Modi’s India,” looking at histories of technocratic ideas in India, and how they have combined with Modi’s particular brand of populism.

A lot is written about the supply side of mis- and disinformation, including how propagandists and political leaders are using messages and platforms to impact public opinion. But less is written about the demand side. When it comes to false beliefs that each of us adopt and harbor to help us understand the world and events in it, what are the incentives and social dimensions that each of us as individuals and as members of the community are responding to that drive our appetite for misinformation? Today’s guest has devoted her research to this subject, and has just published a book that serves as a very accessible entry point to the latest scholarship on this question. Dannagal Young is a Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Delaware and the author of Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation.

There is a term you've likely heard on the Tech Policy Press podcast in the past: the Brussels Effect. The term is meant to describe the European Union’s outsized influence on global markets through its regulations. You may not know that the term was first coined by Anu Bradford, a professor at Columbia Law School. She wrote a book about it called The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World. Now, she has a new book, just out from Oxford University Press, called Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology The book describes the geopolitical competition to establish digital governance models between the US, the EU, and China. Justin Hendrix had the opportunity to speak to Bradford about the book, and why she thinks the US government, by failing to regulate its tech companies, may ultimately imperil not only the US model but internet freedom more broadly.

The 13th installment of the Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House finds that "while advances in artificial intelligence offer benefits for society, they have also been used to increase the scale and efficiency of digital repression." Justin Hendrix spoke with two of the report's authors- Allie Funk and Kian Vesteinsson about their findings, which unfortunately do not represent a change of trajectory from prior years.

While US Senators are busy holding hearings and forums and posing for pictures with the CEOs of AI companies, the European Union is just months away from passing sweeping regulation of artificial intelligence. As negotiations continue between the European Parliament, Council, and Commission, Justin Hendrix spoke to one observer who is paying close attention to every detail: the Ada Lovelace Institute's European Public Policy Lead, Connor Dunlop. Connor recently published a briefing on five areas of focus for the trilogue negotiations that recommence next week.

In Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant has written a new history of perhaps one of the most famous movements for worker rights and power in the face of automation. The book sets the record straight on the Luddites, and unpacks what today’s workers can learn from them. 

The ubiquity of cameras in our phones and our environment, coupled with massive social media networks that can share images and video in an instant, means we see often graphic and disturbing images with great frequency. How are people processing such material? And how is it different for people working in newsrooms, social media companies, and human rights and social justice organizations? What protections might be put in place to protect people from vicarious trauma and other harms, and what is the ultimate benefit of doing this work?In their new book, Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in Our Online Lives, University of California Berkeley scholars Alexa Koenig and Andrea Lampros set out to answer those questions.

In 2019, journalist Kashmir Hill had just joined The New York Times when she got a tip about the existence of a company called Clearview AI that claimed it could identify almost anyone with a photo. But the company was hard to contact, and people who knew about it didn’t want to talk. Hill resorted to old fashioned shoe-leather reporting, trying to track down the company and its executives. By January of 2020, the Times was ready to report what she had learned in a piece titled “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.” Three years later, Hill has published a book that tells the story of Clearview AI, but with the benefit of a great deal more reporting and study on the social, political, and technological forces behind it. It's called Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy As We Know It, just out from Penguin Random House.

Today’s episode features two segments, both of which consider the scale of technology platforms and their power over markets and people. In the first, Rebecca Rand delivers a conversation with University of Technology Sydney researcher Dr. Luis Lozano-Paredes about a community of drivers in Colombia who have hacked together a way to preserve their power alongside the adoption of ride sharing apps. And in the second, Justin Hendrix speaks with Columbia University Law School Professor of Law, Science and Technology Tim Wu, who recently spent two years on the National Economic Council in the White House as Special Assistant to the President for Competition and Technology. The conversation touches on privacy legislation, ideas about competition and scale, and Wu's observations on the landmark antitrust trial between the Justice Department and Google, which wrapped up its first week of testimony on Friday. The conversation took place at the All Tech is Human Responsible Tech Summit, hosted with the Consulate General of Canada in New York, on September 14th.

This episode features two segments on the subject of disinformation. In the first, Rebecca Rand speaks with Dr. Shelby Grossman, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, on recent research that looks at whether AI can write persuasive propaganda. In the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Dr. Kirsty Park, the Policy Lead at the European Media Observatory Ireland, and Stephan Mündges, the manager of the Institute of Journalism at TU Dortmund University and one of the coordinators of the German-Austrian Digital Media Observatory, about the report they authored that looks in detail at baseline reporting from big technology platforms that are part of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.

One of the problems we come back to again and again on the Tech Policy Press podcast is the problem of how to govern social media platforms. Today’s guest is Paul Gowder, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Research and Intellectual Life at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law and a founding fellow of the Integrity Institute. Gowder is the author of The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms, a book that he says takes an institutional political science approach to the problem of tech platform governance, arguing “that the goals of effective governance capacity development and of global justice” can come together, and that we can build “worldwide direct democratic institutions to exercise public authority over the operations of the big platforms.”

This episode features two segments. In the first, Rebecca Rand speaks with Alina Leidinger, a researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam about her research- with coauthor Richard Rogers- into which stereotypes are moderated and under-moderated in search engine autocompletion. In the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Associated Press investigative journalist Garance Burke about a new chapter in the AP Stylebook offering guidance on how to report on artificial intelligence.

This episode features two segments. In the first, Rebecca Rand considers the social consequences of "machine allocation behavior" with Cornell researchers Houston Claure and Malte Jung, authors of a recent paper on the topic with coauthors Seyun Kim and René Kizilcec.In the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Tom Kemp, author of a new book out August 22 from Fast Company Press titled Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy.

This week, Indian legislators approved a data protection law that will govern the processing of data in the country. The bill creates a data protection board and gives the government new powers, including to request information from companies and to issue orders to block content. While there is still work to do to determine how the law will be administered, it joins a range of new tech policy laws and regulations enacted against a backdrop of the increasing centralization of power in India’s government.To discuss the bill, Justin Hendrix is joined by Aditi Agrawal, an independent technology journalist based in New Delhi; Kamesh Shekar, a tech policy expert who leads the privacy and data governance vertical at The Dialogue, a think tank based in Delhi; and Prateek Waghre, the Policy Director at the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights advocacy organization based in India.

Lots of voices are calling for the regulation of artificial intelligence. In the US, at present it seems there is no federal legislation close to becoming law. But in 2023 legislative sessions in states across the country, there has been a surge in AI laws proposed and passed, and some have already taken effect. To learn more about this wave of legislation, I spoke to two people who just posted a comprehensive review of AI laws in US states: Katrina Zhu, a law clerk at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and a law student at the UCLA School of Law, and EPIC senior counsel Ben Winters.

A unique collaboration between social scientists and Meta to conduct research on Facebook and Instagram during the height of the 2020 US election has at long last produced its first work products. The release of four peer-reviewed studies last week in Science and Nature mark the first of as many as sixteen studies that promise fresh insights into the complex dynamics of social media and public discourse. But beyond the findings of the research, the partnership between Meta and some of the most prominent researchers in the field has been held up as a model. With active discussions ongoing in multiple jurisdictions about how best to facilitate access to platform data for independent researchers, it’s worth scrutinizing the strengths and weaknesses of this partnership. And to do that, Justin Hendrix is joined by one researcher who was able to observe and evaluate nearly every detail of the process for the last three years: the project's rapporteur, Michael Wagner, who in his day job is a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In today’s podcast, Justin Hendrix talks with director, writer and actor Alex Winter, whose new documentary, The YouTube Effect, is in select theaters now and will be available on streaming platforms on August 8th. The film's creators assert that "the story of YouTube is the great dilemma of our times; the technology revolution has made our lives easier and more enriched, while also presenting dangers and challenges that make the world a more perilous place."

Today’s guest on the podcast is Ifeoma Ajunwa, the AI.Humanity Professor of Law and Ethics and Director of AI and the Law Program at Emory Law School, and author of the Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace. from Cambridge University Press. The book considers how data and artificial intelligence are changing the workplace, and whether the law is more equipped to help workers in this transition, or to provide for the interests of employers.

Artificial intelligence will likely impact every type of job. But this summer, Hollywood actors and writers have raised substantial concerns about the ways in which generative AI systems may be used to replace aspects of their human craft. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are currently joined in a dual strike, hoping to make progress on a range of labor grievances with the studios and streaming companies that employ them. Today’s guest is Justine Bateman, a writer, director, producer, author, and member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the WGA, and SAG-AFTRA. Bateman has been on both sides of the camera for much of her life, and has a particularly sharp perspective on how AI may change the entertainment industry, and why it matters to all workers that the unions are standing up on these issues now.

One of the most urgent debates in tech policy at the moment concerns encrypted communications. At issue in proposed legislation, such as the UK’s Online Safety Bill or the EARN It Act put forward in the US Senate, is whether such laws break the privacy promise of end to end encryption by requiring content moderation mechanisms like client-side scanning. But to what extent are such moderation techniques legal under existing laws that limit the monitoring and interception of communications? Today’s guest is James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar with a computer science background who recently conducted a review of various moderation technologies to determine how they might hold up in under US federal communication privacy regimes including the Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). The conversation touches on how technologies like server side and client side scanning work, the extent to which the law may fail to accommodate or even contemplate such technologies, and where the encryption debate is headed as these technologies advance.

Tomorrow's virtual worlds will be governed, at least at first, by today's legal and regulatory regimes. How will privacy law, torts, IP, or even criminal law apply in 'extended reality' (XR)?Drawing from the discussion at a conference hosted earlier this year at Stanford University called "Existing Law and Extended Reality," this episode asks what challenges will emerge from human behavior and interaction-- with one another and with technology-- inside XR experiences, and what choices governments and tech companies will face in addressing those challenges.This episode of The Sunday Show was produced by Tech Policy Press audio and reporting intern Rebecca Rand, and features the voices of experts such as Brittan Heller (the organizer of the Stanford conference), Mary Anne Franks, Kent Bye, Jameson Spivack, Joseph Palmer, Eugene Volokh, Amie Stepanovich, Susan Aaronson, Florence G'Sell, and Avi Bar Zeev.

This spring, Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein from the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative published a document they call the Civic Information Handbook, which they produced in collaboration with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Civic information—“important information needed to participate in democracy—is too often drowned out by viral falsehoods, including conspiracy theories.” The Handbook is intended as a resource to help knowledge-producing organizations in the “amplification of fact-based information.” To learn more about the handbook and the ideas on which it is based, Justin Hendrix spoke to GMF research assistant Adrienne Goldstein, as well as Kathryn Peters, executive director of UNC CITAP.

Alex Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and Emily M. Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, are the hosts of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, a show that seeks to "break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation." Justin Hendrix spoke to Alex and Emily about the show's origins, and what they hope will come of the effort to scrutinize statements about the potential of AI that are often fantastical.

Last week, Canada passed the Online News Act, legislation that requires tech platforms to remunerate Canadian news outlets, and the platforms are not happy. In response, Google announced it will remove links to Canadian news outlets from its products. Meta also said it would remove Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram. The Act itself has yet to be implemented- it has to first go through a regulatory process to sort out how it will work. So, these moves by the platforms may be a tactic in the negotiation of the particulars. But the platforms also clearly want to send a message to other jurisdictions where similar legislation is under consideration.For an expert opinion on the politics surrounding Canada’s Online News Act and its broader implications, Tech Policy Press Contributing Editor Ben Lennett spoke to one person who has been following it closely from his perch in Montreal. Taylor Owen is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, the founding director of The Center for Media, Technology and Democracy, and an Associate Professor in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. 

Over the past few months, there have been a range of voices calling for the urgent regulation of artificial intelligence. Comparisons to the problems of nuclear proliferation abound, so perhaps it’s no surprise that some want a new international body similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But when it comes to AI and global governance, there’s already a lot in play- from ethics councils to various schemes for industry governance, activity on standards, various international agreements, and legislation that will have international impact, such as the EU’s AI Act. To help get his head around the complicated, evolving ecology of global AI governance, Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the three authors of a recent paper in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science that attempts to take stock of and explore the tensions between different approaches, including Michael Veale, an associate professor in the Faculty of Laws at University College London, where he works on the intersection of computer science, law, and policy; and Robert Gorwa, a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center, a large publicly-funded research institute in Germany.

Earlier this month, Justin Hendrix traveled to RightsCon, the big gathering of individuals and organizations concerned with human rights and technology organized by Access Now. The sprawling event had hundreds of sessions on a wide range of themes, but one topic discussed across multiple tracks was the importance of encrypted communications, especially to groups such as political dissidents and journalists. A key panel at RightsCon featured Signal President Meredith Whittaker, who spoke out about policies proposed in legislatures around the world that threaten the promise of end-to-end encryption to preserve the privacy of messages sent between individuals and groups. Leaders of encrypted apps have pulled together of late to speak out against the proposed UK Online Safety Bill, signing letters and appearing at events. Shortly after RightsCon, Hendrix connected with Whittaker to learn more about Signal’s posture against such legislation, why she sees encrypted communications as so crucial to freedom and human rights, and how the company thinks about safety and its role in the broader digital ecosystem.

In the United States, it’s fair to say that federal, state and local governments have struggled in the era of digitalization. Decades in to that era, there is still a gap between the policy outcomes we seek and what citizens often get when they engage with government agencies and services online. At its worst this gap means people aren’t receiving critical services that sustain their lives; and at the very least it reduces faith in government to be able to solve problems right at the moment when it’s clear the collective challenges we face are going to Jennifer Pahlka, who served in President Barack Obama’s administration as deputy chief technology officer and founded the nonprofit Code for America, has written a book that asks us to reexamine how government works, and how it should work, in the digital age. It's called Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, and it's the subject of the podcast today.

Last week, a group of very important people, including the U.S Secretaries of State and Commerce and trade representatives from President Joe Biden’s administration, met with top European Union officials in the heart of the Swedish Lapland for the fourth Ministerial meeting of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, or “TTC”. Pressing needs were tackled, new initiatives were launched, commitments were made, and cooperation was deepened on a range of tech policy issues, at least according to the press releases. To hear an unvarnished view from someone who was at the meeting about what might actually come of it all, Justin Hendrix invited on a journalist who is, in my opinion, one the best tech policy reporters in the world: Mark Scott, Chief Technology Correspondent for Politico.

Today’s show has two segments both focused on generative AI. In the first segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Irene Solaiman, a researcher who has put a lot of thought into evaluating the release strategies for generative AI systems. Organizations big and small have pursued different methods for release of these systems, some holding their models and details about them very close, and some pursuing a more open approach. And in the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Calli Schroeder and Ben Winters at the Electronic Privacy Information Center about a new report they helped write about the harms of generative AI, and what to do about them.

Last week, the Supreme Court released decisions in Gonzalez v. Google, LLC, and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh. In this episode we’ll discuss what it tells us about how the Court is thinking about social media and intermediary liability, and what it might tell us about future cases the Court may hear. I’m joined by an expert who follows these issues closely, and has shared his expertise with us on this podcast before: Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University.

Today’s episode features a discussion with Nick Seaver, a professor at Tufts University and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation from the University of Chicago Press. Nick is an anthropologist who studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. His book is the product of ethnographic observation and conversations with developers working on music recommendation algorithms and other systems designed to understand and cater to user preferences. His research gives us a better understanding of the motivations of the executives and engineers designing systems to command our attention, which he considers to be “a currency, a capacity, a filter, a spotlight, and a moral responsibility.”

Justin Hendrix speaks to writer Malcolm Harris about his book, PALO ALTO: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM, AND THE WORLD, which considers the historical antecedents for the project of Silicon Valley.

Recently Justin Hendrix caught up with Gus Hurwitz, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and the director of the Governance and Technology Center. He’s also the Director of Law and Economics Programs at the International Center for Law and Economics, a Portland based think tank that focuses on antitrust law and economics policy issues. Hurwitz told Hendrix he’s leaving Nebraska at the end of the semester for a new position that is soon to be announced. The conversation covered a range of topics, from how to think about the relationship between technology and the law, how to get engineers to engage with ethical and legal concepts, the view of the coastal tech policy discourse from Hurwitz’s vantage in the middle of the country, the role and politics of the Federal Trade Commission, and why he finds some inspiration in Frank Herbert’s Dune.

In the course of its investigation into the insurrection at the US Capitol, the House Select Committee on January 6th spoke to hundreds of witnesses, including social media executives with insight into the role that platforms played in propagating the false claims that motivated violence that day, and in connecting and facilitating the movement and organization of people that sought to overthrow the election.One of the individuals that testified to the Select Committee was a former Twitter official, Anika Collier Navaroli. Justin Hendrix had a chance to speak with Anika earlier this month, to hear how her thinking has evolved in this time under the spotlight, and what she’s hoping to do next to continue her journey as an intellectual and an activist working at the intersection of tech, media and democracy.

Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix is joined by a UK lawmaker and advocate who has been influential in the global push for more protections for children online. Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE is a Crossbench member of the House of Lords and sits on the Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee, and she’s a Commissioner for UNESCO's Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, where she is a member of the Working Group on Child Online Safety. She’s the Founder and Chair of 5Rights Foundation, which seeks to ensure children and young people are afforded the right to participate in the digital world “creatively, knowledgeably and fearlessly.” 5Rights played a key role in advancing the UK Children’s Code, as well as the California Age Appropriate Design Code Act, passed last year. Baroness Kidron discussed the broad trajectory of efforts to address online child safety, what she thinks about the legal challenge to the California law and some of the harsher provisions of child safety laws in other parts of the country, and where she believes the fight for child digital safety is headed in the future. 

In this episode, Tech Policy Press board member and UCLA School of Law postdoctoral research fellow Courtney Radsch interviews Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen, Denmark’s Tech Ambassador, who represents the Danish Government to the global tech industry and in global governance forums on emerging technologies. The discussion focuses on the role of tech in society, how to regulate artificial intelligence, how to accommodate non-English and indigenous languages in a tech ecosystem focused on scale, and how to capitalize journalism in the age of social media.

This episode features two segments. We’ll hear from Ellen P. Goodman, Senior Advisor for Algorithmic Justice at the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which just launched an inquiry seeking comment on “what policies will help businesses, government, and the public be able to trust that Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems work as claimed – and without causing harm.” And, we’ll speak with Dr. Michal Luria, a Research Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology who had a column in Wired this month under the headline, Your ChatGPT Relationship Status Shouldn’t Be Complicated. She says the way people talk to each other is influenced by their social roles, but ChatGPT is blurring the lines of communication.