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PODCAST

Scaling Laws

Lawfare & University of Texas Law School

Scaling Laws explores (and occasionally answers) the questions that keep OpenAI’s policy team up at night, the ones that motivate legislators to host hearings on AI and draft new AI bills, and the ones that are top of mind for tech-savvy law and policy students. Co-hosts Alan Rozenshtein, Professor at Minnesota Law and Research Director at Lawfare, and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas and Senior Editor at Lawfare, dive into the intersection of AI, innovation

government politics

All Episodes

45:53

An Interview with Meta’s Chief Privacy Officers

Scaling Laws ·

2023/04/28

In 2018, news broke that Facebook had allowed third-party developers—including the controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica—to obtain large quantities of user data in ways that users probably didn’t anticipate. The fallout led to a controversy over whether Cambridge Analytica had in some way swung the 2016 election for Trump (spoiler: it almost certainly didn’t), but it also generated a $5 billion fine imposed on Facebook by the FTC for violating users’ privacy. Along with that

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53:48

Eugene Volokh on AI Libel

Scaling Laws ·

2023/04/26

If someone lies about you, you can usually sue them for defamation. But what if that someone is ChatGPT? Already in Australia, the mayor of a town outside Melbourne has threatened to sue OpenAI because ChatGPT falsely named him a guilty party in a bribery scandal. Could that happen in America? Does our libel law allow that? What does it even mean for a large language model to act with "malice"? Does the First Amendment put any limits on the ability to hold these models, and the companies that make

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46:32

A TikTok Ban and the First Amendment

Scaling Laws ·

2023/04/14

Over the past few years, TikTok has become a uniquely polarizing social media platform. On the one hand, millions of users, especially those in their teens and twenties, love the app. On the other hand, the government is concerned that TikTok's vulnerability to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party makes it a serious national security threat. There's even talk of banning the app altogether. But would that be legal? In particular, does the First Amendment allow the government to ban an

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45:05

Ravi Iyer on How to Improve Technology Through Design

Scaling Laws ·

2023/03/27

On the latestepisodeof Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare's series on the information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ravi Iyer, the Managing Director of thePsychology of Technology Instituteat the University of Southern California'sNeely Center.Earlier in his career, Ravi held a number of positions at Meta, where he worked to make Facebook's algorithm provide actual value, not just "engagement," to users. Quinta and Alan spoke with Ravi about why he thinks that content moderation

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50:28

Does Section 230 Protect ChatGPT?

Scaling Laws ·

2023/03/09

During recent oral arguments inGonzalez v. Google,a Supreme Court case concerning the scope of liability protections for internet platforms, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked a thought-provoking question. Does Section 230, the statute that shields websites from liability for third-party content, apply to a generative AI model like ChatGPT?Luckily, Matt Perault of theCenter on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had already been thinking about thisquestion andpublished

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59:22

ChatGPT Tells All

Scaling Laws ·

2023/02/01

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

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45:03

When States Make Tech Policy

Scaling Laws ·

2023/01/23

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

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43:46

Rick Hasen and Nate Persily on Replatforming Trump on...

Scaling Laws ·

2022/12/15

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

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46:13

A Member of Meta’s Oversight Board Discusses the...

Scaling Laws ·

2022/12/12

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

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57:32

Decentralized Social Media and the Great Twitter Exodus

Scaling Laws ·

2022/11/08

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

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52:42

The Supreme Court Takes On 230

Scaling Laws ·

2022/10/13

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

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1:01:08

Mark Bergen on the Rise and Rise of YouTube

Scaling Laws ·

2022/10/04

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

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54:30

The Fifth Circuit is Wrong on the Internet

Scaling Laws ·

2022/09/23

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

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50:58

When Lawyers Spread Disinformation

Scaling Laws ·

2022/08/05

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

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58:44

The Corporate Law Behind Musk v. Twitter

Scaling Laws ·

2022/07/28

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

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55:52

Online Speech and Section 230 After Dobbs

Scaling Laws ·

2022/07/21

When the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, the impact of the decision on the internet may not have been front of mind for most people thinking through the implications. But in the weeks after the Court’s decision, it’s become clear that the post-Dobbs legal landscape around abortion implicates many questions around not only data and digital privacy, but also online speech. One piece of model state legislation, for example,

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57:52

When Doctors Spread Disinformation

Scaling Laws ·

2022/07/14

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve talked a lot on this show about how falsehoods about the coronavirus are spread and generated. For this episode, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with two emergency medicine physicians who have seen the practical effects of those falsehoods while treating patients over the last two years. Nick Sawyer and Taylor Nichols are two of the cofounders of the organization No License for Disinformation, a group that advocates for medical authorities to take

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1:03:30

What We Talk About When We Talk About Algorithms

Scaling Laws ·

2022/07/07

Algorithms! We hear a lot about them. They drive social media platforms and, according to popular understanding, are responsible for a great deal of what’s wrong about the internet today—and maybe the downfall of democracy itself. But … what exactly are algorithms? And, given they’re not going away, what should they be designed to do?Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI and someone who has thought a lot about

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54:06

The Jan. 6 Committee Takes On the Big Lie

Scaling Laws ·

2022/06/30

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is midway through a blockbuster series of hearings exploring Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. Central to those efforts, of course, was the Big Lie—the false notion that Trump was cheated out of victory in 2020.This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Kate Starbird, an associate professor of Human

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50:30

Rebroadcast: The Most Intense Online Disinformation...

Scaling Laws ·

2022/06/23

If you’ve been watching the hearings convened by the House select committee on Jan. 6, you’ve seen a great deal about how the Trump campaign generated and spread falsehoods about supposed election fraud in 2020. As the committee has argued, those falsehoods were crucial in generating the political energy that culminated in the explosion of the January 6 insurrection.What shape did those lies take, and how did social media platforms attempt to deal with them at the time? Today, we’re bringing you an

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