Scaling Laws

You've likely heard of ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI. But you’ve likely never heard an interview with ChatGPT, much less an interview in which ChatGPT reflects on its own impact on the information ecosystem. Nor is it likely that you’ve ever heard ChatGPT promising to stop producing racist and misogynistic content. But, on this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with ChatGPT to talk about a range of things: the pronouns it prefers; academic integrity and the chatbot’s likely impact on that; and importantly, the experiments performed by a scholar name Eve Gaumond, who has been on a one-woman campaign to get ChatGPT to write offensive content. ChatGPT made some pretty solid representations that this kind of thing may be in its past, but wouldn't ever be in its future again.So, following Ben’s interview with ChatGPT, he sat down with Eve Gaumond, an AI scholar at the Public Law Center of the University of Montréal, who fact-checked ChatGPT's claims. Can you still get it to write a poem entitled, “She Was Smart for a Woman”? Can you get it to write a speech by Heinrich Himmler about Jews? And can you get ChatGPT to write a story belittling the Holocaust? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tech policy reform occupies a strange place in Washington, D.C. Everyone seems to agree that the government should change how it regulates the technology industry, on issues from content moderation to privacy—and yet, reform never actually seems to happen. But while the federal government continues to stall, state governments are taking action. More and more, state-level officials are proposing and implementing changes in technology policy. Most prominently, Texas and Florida recently passed laws restricting how platforms can moderate content, which will likely be considered by the Supreme Court later this year.On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with J. Scott Babwah Brennen and Matt Perault of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill. In recent months, they’ve put together two reports on state-level tech regulation. They talked about what’s driving this trend, why and how state-level policymaking differs—and doesn’t—from policymaking at the federal level, and what opportunities and complications this could create. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On November 19, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk announced that he would be reinstating former President Donald Trump’s account on the platform—though so far, Trump hasn’t taken Musk up on the offer, preferring instead to stay on his bespoke website Truth Social. Meanwhile, Meta’s Oversight Board has set a January 2023 deadline for the platform to decide whether or not to return Trump to Facebook following his suspension after the Jan. 6 insurrection. How should we think through the difficult question of how social media platforms should handle the presence of a political leader who delights in spreading falsehoods and ginning up violence?Luckily for us, Stanford and UCLA recently held a conference on just that. On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Lawfare senior editors Alan Rozenshtein and Quinta Jurecic sat down with the conference’s organizers, election law experts Rick Hasen and Nate Persily, to talk about whether Trump should be returned to social media. They debated the tangled issues of Trump’s deplatforming and replatforming … and discussed whether, and when, Trump will break the seal and start tweeting again. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen shared a trove of internal company documents to the Wall Street Journal in 2021, some of the most dramatic revelations concerned the company’s use of a so-called “cross-check” system that, according to the Journal, essentially exempted certain high-profile users from the platform’s usual rules. After the Journal published its report, Facebook—which has since changed its name to Meta—asked the platform’s independent Oversight Board to weigh in on the program. And now, a year later, the Board has finally released its opinion. On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Lawfare senior editors Alan Rozenshtein and Quinta Jurecic sat down with Suzanne Nossel, a member of the Oversight Board and the CEO of PEN America. She talked us through the Board’s findings, its criticisms of cross-check, and its recommendations for Meta going forward.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s Election Day in the United States—so while you wait for the results to come in, why not listen to a podcast about the other biggest story obsessing the political commentariat right now? We’re talking, of course, about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the billionaire’s dramatic and erratic changes to the platform. In response to Musk’s takeover, a great number of Twitter users have made the leap to Mastodon, a decentralized platform that offers a very different vision of what social media could look like. What exactly is decentralized social media, and how does it work? Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein has a paper on just that, and he sat down with Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic on the podcast to discuss for an episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem. They were also joined by Kate Klonick, associate professor of law at St. John’s University, to hash out the many, many questions about content moderation and the future of the internet sparked by Musk’s reign and the new popularity of Mastodon.Among the works mentioned in this episode:“Welcome to hell, Elon. You break it, you buy it,” by Nilay Patel on The Verge“Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve,” by Mike Masnick on Techdirt Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Supreme Court has granted cert in two cases exploring the interactions between anti-terrorism laws and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. To discuss the cases, Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes sat down on Arbiters of Truth, our occasional series on the online information ecosystem, with Lawfare senior editors and Rational Security co-hosts Quinta Jurecic, Alan Rozenshtein, and Scott R. Anderson. They discussed the state of 230 law, what the Supreme Court has taken on, what the lower court did, and if there is a right answer here and what it might look like. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, we’re bringing you another episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem. Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Mark Bergen, a reporter for Bloomberg News and Businessweek, about his new book, “Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination.” YouTube is one of the largest and most influential social media platforms, but Bergen argues that it’s long been “criminally undercovered.” As he tells it, the story of YouTube has a great deal to tell us about the development of the modern attention economy, the promise and pitfalls of the internet, and the struggles of platforms to grapple with their own influence and responsibility.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem has been taking a bit of a hiatus—but we’re back! On today’s episode, we’re discussing the recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in NetChoice v. Paxton, upholding a Texas law that binds large social media platforms to certain transparency requirements and significantly limits their ability to moderate content. The decision is truly a wild ride—so unhinged that it’s difficult to figure out where First Amendment law in this area might go next.To discuss, Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with fellow Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein and Alex Abdo, the litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University—who’s come on the podcast before to discuss the case. They tried to make sense of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling and chart out alternative possibilities for what good-faith jurisprudence on social media regulation might look like. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A few weeks ago on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information system, we brought you a conversation with two emergency room doctors about their efforts to push back against members of their profession spreading falsehoods about the coronavirus. Today, we’re going to take a look at another profession that’s been struggling to counter lies and falsehoods within its ranks: the law. Recently, lawyers involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election have faced professional discipline—like Rudy Giuliani, whose law license has been suspended temporarily in New York and D.C. while a New York ethics investigation remains ongoing.Quinta Jurecic sat down with Paul Rosenzweig a contributing editor at Lawfare and a board member with the 65 Project, an organization that seeks to hold accountable lawyers who worked to help Trump hold onto power in 2020—often by spreading lies. He’s also spent many years working on issues related to legal ethics. So what avenues of discipline are available for lawyers who tell lies about elections? How does the legal discipline process work? And how effective can legal discipline be in reasserting the truth? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You’ve likely heard that Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter… and that he is now trying to get out of buying Twitter… and that at first he wanted to defeat the bots on Twitter… but now he’s apparently surprised that there are lots of bots on Twitter. It's a spectacle made for the headlines, but it's also, at its core, a regular old corporate law dispute. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek spoke with Adriana Robertson, the Donald N. Pritzker Professor of Business Law at the University of Chicago Law School, to talk about the legal issues behind the headlines. What is the Delaware Court of Chancery in which Musk and Twitter are going to face off? Will it care at all about the bots? And how do corporate lawyers think and talk about this differently from how it gets talked about in most of the public conversation about it? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.