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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

50:32

Matt Perault, Ramya Krishnan, and Alan Rozenshtein...

Scaling Laws ·

2024/03/22

Last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular social media app TikTok, to divest its ownership in the platform or face TikTok being banned in the United States. Although prospects for the bill in the Senate remain uncertain, President Biden has said he will sign the bill if it comes to his desk, and this is the most serious attempt yet to ban the controversial social media app.Today'spodcastis thelatestin

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51:38

Jawboning at the Supreme Court

Scaling Laws ·

2024/03/21

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem.On March 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, concerning the potential First Amendment implications of government outreach to social media platforms—what’s sometimes known as jawboning. The case arrived at the Supreme Court with a somewhat shaky evidentiary record, but the legal questions raised by government requests or demands to remove online content are real. To make

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49:27

How Are the TikTok Bans Holding Up in Court?

Scaling Laws ·

2024/01/03

In May 2023, Montanapassed a new lawthat would ban the use of TikTok within the state starting on January 1, 2024. But as of today, TikTok is still legal in the state of Montana—thanks to a preliminary injunction issued by a federal district judge, who found that the Montana law likely violated the First Amendment. In Texas, meanwhile, another federal judge recently upheld a more limited ban against the use of TikTok on state-owned devices. What should we make of these rulings, and how should we

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53:58

Jeff Horwitz on Broken Code and Reporting on Facebook

Scaling Laws ·

2023/12/20

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a monster scoop: a series of articles about Facebook’s inner workings, which showed that employees within the famously secretive company had raised alarms about potential harms caused by Facebook’s products. Now, Jeff Horwitz, the reporter behind that scoop, has a new book out, titled “Broken Code”—which dives even deeper into the documents he uncovered from within the company. He’s one of the most rigorous reporters covering Facebook, now known as Meta.On

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49:03

Will Generative AI Reshape Elections?

Scaling Laws ·

2023/11/29

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a great deal over the last year about generative AI and how it’s going to reshape various aspects of our society. That includes elections. With one year until the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we thought it would be a good time to step back and take a look at how generative AI might and might not make a difference when it comes to the political landscape. Luckily, Matt Perault and Scott Babwah Brennen of the UNC Center on Technology

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57:00

The Crisis Facing Efforts to Counter Election...

Scaling Laws ·

2023/10/20

Over the course of the last two presidential elections, efforts by social media platforms and independent researchers to prevent falsehoods from spreading about election integrity have become increasingly central to civic health. But the warning signs are flashing as we head into 2024. And platforms are arguably in a worse position to counter falsehoods today than they were in 2020.How could this be? On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor

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46:22

Talking AI with Data and Society’s Janet Haven

Scaling Laws ·

2023/10/05

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem. And we’re discussing the hot topic of the moment: artificial intelligence. There are a lot of less-than-informed takes out there about AI and whether it’s going to kill us all—so we’re glad to be able to share an interview that hopefully cuts through some of that noise.Janet Haven is the Executive Director of the nonprofit Data and Society and a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory

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45:24

What Impact did Facebook Have on the 2020 Elections?

Scaling Laws ·

2023/09/11

How much influence do social media platforms have on American politics and society? It’s a tough question for researchers to answer—not just because it’s so big, but also because platforms rarely if ever provide all the data that would be needed to address the problem.A new batch of papers released in the journals Science and Nature marks the latest attempt to tackle this question, with access to data provided by Facebook’s parent company Meta. The 2020 Facebook & Instagram Research Election

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1:04:21

Brian Fishman on Violent Extremism and Platform...

Scaling Laws ·

2023/05/12

Earlier this year, Brian Fishman published a fantastic paper with Brookings thinking through how technology platforms grapple with terrorism and extremism, and how any reform to Section 230 must allow those platforms space to continue doing that work. That’s the short description, but the paper is really about so much more—about how the work of content moderation actually takes place, how contemporary analyses of the harms of social media fail to address the history of how platforms addressed

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29:52

Cox and Wyden on Section 230 and Generative AI

Scaling Laws ·

2023/05/02

Generative AI products have been tearing up the headlines recently. Among the many issues these products raise is whether or not their outputs are protected by Section 230, the foundational statute that shields websites from liability for third-party content.On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic and Matt Perault, Director of the Center on Technology and Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, talked through this

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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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192 results

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