Dear TMaC Students:
We’re having a good week; the last TMaC dinner on Wednesday March 27. A job talk from Meta’s Oversight Board including Cecilia Pou and Desmond Chu. The filter got changed on the water fountain on the 4th floor after I called it in (tel 212 854 0222).
The New York Times ran a fascinating article on the backlash against disinformation researchers and policy interventions. French regulators fined. Google fined 250 million euros for illegally using news in their large language models. This topic will be part of our summer research and we’re already being asked to speak with publishers and regulators at a number of meetings in Europe this summer. Last Monday, we testified at the South African competition commission hearings, as part of the platform inquiry, and four press councils in the ASEAN region are now planning to set up their own “Saving Journalism” organizations. If that isn’t impact, I don’t know what is. TMaC students began this work with me in 2020.
TMaC Adjunct Peter Micek spent last week at the 3rd Summit for Democracy, a summit where global leaders gather to discuss topics like fostering democracy for future generations, and sent us some news:
I had the opportunity to brief states newly signed onto the Joint Statement on stopping the proliferation of commercial spyware. Here's the US government press release re: new states signing.
A recurring theme of the high level event was the battle over who sets the rules for governance of AI, a broad term that I doubt most folks there agreed on a definition of. But there's a compelling contest between visions of an "AI sovereignty" -- think nationalized Large Language Models owned or managed by states but developed by the private sector -- versus what US State Dept. is calling "global digital solidarity," which Eileen Donahoe, current Special Envoy and Coordinator for Digital Freedom in the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, promotes as a more multi-stakeholder approach. Human rights advocates noted that where governance affirms digital human rights, policymakers and companies build trust, which ultimately aids innovation.
Here were some battling diplomatic statements by China and South Korea over the conference. For its part, North Korea launched two ICBMs into the ocean on the morning the conference began.
In other news, the new AI resolution authored by the US government, which we 'negotiated' in class, passed at the UN General Assembly! Here is some coverage quoting my organization as well as some general coverage.
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