What I'm Reading - 2/25/24

I’m back on the Eastern Shore this weekend. Next weekend, I’ll be in Austin for the start of a twelve-day trip. I’m excited to see people but also looking forward to more than a week in the DC area later in March.

Before we jump into what I’m reading, here are a few things to note.

First, I wanted to flag a new philosophical razor that a friend, Dave Willner, came up with this week (at least I haven’t seen it anywhere else), and another friend, Brian Fishman, coined Willner’s Razor. This came up in discussing Google’s issues with Gemini this week and how we need a way to lean towards blaming insufficient resourcing or time for issues rather than incompetence. An important thing to keep in mind as AI continues to barrel forward.

Second, I noticed myself saying something more this week. For decades now, Googling something has been a shorthand for looking information up. But this week, I realized I’m starting to talk about prompting rather than searching. Part of it is me discussing my Wednesday newsletter with people and the concept of prompt moderation, but I also found myself saying to someone that we should prompt Bard (now called Gemini) about that and see what it says. It made me wonder how our vocabulary will slowly evolve with AI, and we might not even realize it.

Third, my good friends over at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab are surveying the AI-borne risks to the integrity of the US 2024 election. If you are a tech policy nerd like me or have thoughts on this subject, they’d love to hear from you! Take the survey here.

Have a lovely Sunday!

Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics. 

What I’m Reading

1. Economist: Where democracy is most at risk 

2. Economist Intelligence Unit: Democracy Index 2023

3. Lawfare: Texas, Florida, and the Magic Speech Sorting Hat in the NetChoice Cases

4. TechPolicy.Press: First Amendment Defenders and the Supreme Court Should Reject the Jawboning Bogeyman 

5. TIME: The Supreme Court Could Determine the Future of Social Media Content Moderation

6. The Hill: House launching bipartisan AI task force 

7. The Hill: Facebook whistleblower, AI godfather join hundreds calling for deepfake regulation

8. New York Times: Google Chatbot’s A.I. Images Put People of Color in Nazi-Era Uniforms - The New York Times 

9. The Verge: Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis

10. Google: Gemini image generation got it wrong. We'll do better. 

11. Reuters: Exclusive: Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google 

12. Axios: Naming a "chief AI officer" loses momentum as AI becomes everyone's job 

13. Nihal J. Krishan - The Hindu: Scoop: OpenAI execs discuss increased risk of election misinformation in India during closed door meeting with top Indian tech policy minds

14. Politico EU: How Europe learned to stop worrying and love TikTok

15. Pew Research: How U.S. Adults Use TikTok

16. New York Times: A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men 

17. TechPolicy.Press: Building Common Infrastructure for Meaningful Tech Transparency 

18. The Quint: Meta & Misinformation Combat Alliance Partner To Fight Fake News Using Deepfakes 

19. SecurityWeek: Microsoft Releases Red Teaming Tool for Generative AI 

20. Neiman Journalism Lab: Google tests removing the News tab from search results 

21. Axios: Substack says it now has more than 3 million paid subscriptions 

22. Meta Oversight Board: The Oversight Board Expands to Threads 

23. Fast Company: How Meta gave up on politics 

24. Reuters: Indonesia issues regulations requiring digital platforms to pay media for content 

25. Reuters: Meta believes it is not required to pay for Indonesia news content posted voluntarily

26. Channel News Asia: Analysis: Why big tech's pushback against Jokowi's new media regulation in Indonesia could be bad news for many 

27. Wonks and War Rooms Podcast: Social Media in Politics with Dave Sommer

28. Columbia University: Institute of Global Politics at Columbia SIPA Will House New Trust and Safety Tooling Consortium 

29. NTIA: NTIA Solicits Comments on Open-Weight AI Models 

30. OECD: OECD’s live repository of AI strategies & policies 

31. University of British Columbia: Report: The Peril and Promise of AI for Journalism

32. European Commission: Investigation of the Commission and consumer authorities finds that online influencers rarely disclose commercial content 

33. Financial Times: Thousands march against López Obrador’s institutional overhaul in Mexico 

34. Forbidden Stories: Azerbaijan’s business of election observation

35. Semafor: Belarusian opposition endorses AI candidate in parliamentary elections

36. Economic Times: Misinformation Combat Alliance, Meta introduce WhatsApp Helpline to fight deepfakes 

37. Prospect Magazine: We still live in Steve Jobs’s brave new world - Forty years ago, Apple unveiled the Macintosh—and computing changed forever 

38. Puck News: Marc Andreessen Eats Washington

Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.