In October 2022, a group of researchers published a manifesto establishing a Coalition for Independent Technology Research. “Society needs trustworthy, independent research to relieve the harms of digital technologies and advance the common good,” they wrote. “Research can help us understand ourselves more clearly, identify problems, hold power accountable, imagine the world we want, and test ideas for change. In a democracy, this knowledge comes from academics, journalists, civil society, and c...
Jan 21, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s guest is Robert Weissman , president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. He is the author of a letter addressed to the California Attorney General that raises significant concerns about OpenAI’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. The letter questions whether OpenAI has deviated from its nonprofit purposes, alleging that it may be acting under the control of its for-profit subsidiary, potentially violating its nonprofit mission. The letter raises broader issues about ...
Jan 14, 2024•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 observat...
Jan 07, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 rea...
Dec 31, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 technologi...
Dec 24, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 le...
Dec 17, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Hen...
Dec 10, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, th...
Dec 10, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 co...
Dec 03, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Nov 26, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 on...
Nov 19, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 th...
Nov 14, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Nov 12, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Nov 05, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Oct 29, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Oct 22, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 misinformati...
Oct 15, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Oxfor...
Oct 08, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Oct 04, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 fiv...
Oct 01, 2023•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. ...
Sep 27, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Sep 24, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 C...
Sep 24, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, Scie...
Sep 17, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 a...
Sep 10, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 scienc...
Sep 03, 2023•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ho...
Aug 27, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Aug 20, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 gov...
Aug 13, 2023•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 In...
Aug 06, 2023•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
