To what extent should AI be used in scholarship? Which uses are okay? Which aren’t? Should AI ever be used? What impact will AI have on scholarship in the future?
I recently had a very insightful conversation about these issues with Nita Farahany (Duke Law) and Orin Kerr (Stanford Law).
I recently posted a new paper draft co-authored with Professor Woodrow Hartzog: Meaningful Data Minimization. You can download it here for free. We welcome your feedback.
I recently had a very insightful conversation with a group of professors who teach AI law or related tech law topics. Below, I’ll provide some resources related to our conversation. First, here’s our discussion:
In the terrific comedy TV series, Silicon Valley (2014-2019), there’s a classic scene for privacy law nerds. The show depicts the world of Silicon Valley and the culture of the tech industry. The show illustrates the frenetic pace of building a tech startup, the frequent pivots and existential moments, the constant quest for funding, and the ruthless competition. The potential harms of technologies are often ignored in the potent quest for power and success.
Technological design is power. To be meaningful, regulation must address design.
The design of technology controls what people can and can’t do, how people behave, how people interact with others, the way people make decisions, how much personal data they disclose, and many other things.
Policymakers have been reluctant to regulate design. But it’s nearly impossible to regulate technology without addressing design.
I’ve curated a list of recent works on privacy, AI, and tech that will be worth your time checking out. I didn’t have time to sum up the papers, so I’m pasting the abstracts in full.
With its central theme of appropriating identity, Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) involves a fictional account of himself meeting a man impersonating him. Roth decides to impersonate his impersonator.
In one passage in the book, Roth provides a mini law lesson on the Warren and Brandeis privacy torts as defined by William Prosser:
Watch Daniel Solove’s discussion with Cory Doctorow about AI. Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe how many tech services are deliberately degraded over time, providing less to the user and extracting more for companies. In his latest book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow argues that with tech and AI tools, we must “stop thinking about what the gadget does, and pay attention to who the gadget does it to and who the gadget does it for.”
Here are some darkly satirical snippets of discourse about AI, though these days the distinction between reality and satire has almost completely dissolved.