Longer blog post: AI companies and data creators actually have aligned incentives re: establishing clearer "Data Rules" (norms, rules, contracts that control use of both "fresh" data and of model outputs). Good Data Rules can also support commons! dataleverage.substack.com/p/almost-eve...

"There are many challenges to transforming the AI ecosystem and strong interests resisting change. But we know change is possible, and we believe we have more allies in this effort than it may seem. There is a rebel in every Death Star." 🗣️ @b-cavello.bsky.social in our #4DCongress

Heading to AIES, excited to catch up with folks there!

New blog (a recap post): "How collective bargaining for information, public AI, and HCI research all fit together." Connecting these ideas + a short summary of various recent posts (of which there are many, perhaps too many!). On Substack, but also posted to leaflet

V interesting twist on MCP! “user data is often fragmented across services and locked into specific providers, reinforcing user lock-in” - enter Human Context Protocol (HCP): “user-owned repositories of preferences designed for active, reflective control and consent-based sharing.” 1/

Anyone compiling discussions/thoughts on emerging licensing schemes and preference signals? eg rslstandard.org and github.com/creativecomm... ? externalizing some notes here datalicenses.org, but want to find where these discussions are happening!

Excited to be giving a talk on data leverage to the Singapore AI Safety Hub. Trying to capture updated thoughts from recent years, and have long wanted to better connect leverage/collective bargaining to the safety context.

About a week away from the deadline to submit to the ✨ Workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action (ACA) ✨ acaworkshop.github.io at NeurIPS 2025!

🧵In several recent posts, I speculated that eventually, dataset details may become an important quality signal for consumers choosing AI products. "This model is good for asking health questions, because 10,000 doctors attested to supporting training and/or eval". Etc.

Around ICML with loose evening plans and an interest in "public AI", Canadian sovereign AI, or anything related? Swing by the Internet Archive Canada between 5p and 7p lu.ma/7rjoaxts

[FAccT-related link round-up]: It was great to present on measuring Attentional Agency with Zachary Wojtowicz at FAccT. Here's our paper on ACM DL: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... On Thurs Aditya Karan will present on collective action dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... at 10:57 (New Stage A)

“Attentional agency” — talk in new stage b at facct in the session right now!

Off to FAccT; Excited to see faces old and new!

Another blog post: a link roundup on AI's impact on jobs and power concentration, another proposal for Collective Bargaining for Information, and some additional thoughts on the topic: dataleverage.substack.com/p/on-ai-driv...

New data leverage post: "Google and TikTok rank bundles of information; ChatGPT ranks grains." dataleverage.substack.com/p/google-and... This will be post 1/3 in a series about viewing many AI products as all competing around the same task: ranking bundles or grains of records made by people.

Sharing a new paper (led by Aditya Karan): there's growing interest in algorithmic collective action, when a "collective" acts through data to impact a recommender system, classifier, or other model. But... what happens if two collectives act at the same time?

New early draft post: "Public AI, Data Appraisal, and Data Debates" "A consortium of Public AI labs can substantially improve data pricing, which may also help to concretize debates about the ethics and legality of training practices." dataleverage.substack.com/p/public-ai-...

“Algo decision making systems are “leviathans”, harmful not for their arbitrariness or opacity, but systemacity of decisions" - @christinalu.bsky.social on need for plural #AI model ontologies (sounds technical, but has big consequences for human #commons) www.combinationsmag.com/model-plural...

New Data Leverage newsletter post. It's about... data leverage (specifically, evaluation-focused bargaining) and products du jour (deep research, agents). dataleverage.substack.com/p/evaluation...

I have some new co-authored writing to share, along with a round-up of important articles for the "content ecosystems and AI" space. I'm doing an experiment with microblogging directly to a GitHub repo that I can share across platforms...

Global Dialogues has launched at the Paris #AIActionSummit. Watch @audreyt.org give the announcement via @projectsyndicate.bsky.social youtu.be/XkwqYQL6V4A?... (starts at 02:47:30)

On Mon, wrote a post on the live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword nature of the current data paradigm. On Wed, there was quite a development on this front -- OpenAI came out with a statement that they have evidence that DeepSeek "used" OpenAI models in some fashion (this was faster than I expected!)

Longer version: dataleverage.substack.com/p/live-by-th...

Haven’t seen any AI operators openly commenting yet on the “live by the sword, die by the sword” nature of ask for forgiveness-style data use. But “open” model progress likely to increase the visibility of the tension, for better or worse.

Problem w/ "synthetic data" term is that (I posit) there's *always* some human action you can trace a "synthetic document" to. Problem w/ "AI agents" term is that there's *always* some humans who did the actuation and kick-off who hold moral agency. Obfuscating either is bad.

creativity-ai.github.io kicking off now at #NeurIPS2024... incredibly exciting group of people convened, and important urgent discussions happening

New post — maybe a bit niche in terms of the framing and title, but hopefully catchy (and ultimately, hopeful for the future of AI companies and products) dataleverage.substack.com/p/selling-ag...

Around Vancouver this week — if anyone I’ve (re) connected with here wants to grab coffee

Basically, a reason I think this is important to harp on is my theory of change around data-related collective action research. We have a responsibility to communicate which kinds of action are most impactful to avoid burning out people's activist energy and try to raise concern proportionately.

FWIW, I think maj. of value in social media such as Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, etc. is in the *links*. One of the lessons of WebText. These spaces don't really have cultures of knowledge curation (which is OK; some subreddits an exception). The ongoing discussions about scraping are v. important...

Hi Bluesky (+ many friendly familiar faces). I'm a researcher in HCI + ML, assistant prof at Simon Fraser University up in BC, and working on "healthy data flow". Doing a quick thread recapping some recent writing (blogs, pre-prints, etc.) that capture the things I work on and talk about!

Ok, it's time to micro-blog... (and have *conversations* with people on social media again???)

New post: "Building a Data Pipeworks for Democratic AI: From Human Knowledge to Records to AI Systems" In which I argue for zoomed out, human-centered model of data production (and circle back to arguing for old-school cybernetics?) (Won't just be posting links on here!)

After a busy CHI in Hamburg, @kjfeng.bsky.social is on a panel today at the Knight Institute on using interactive machine teaching for everyday users of social media to be able to customize their feeds. https://knightcolumbia.org/events/optimizing-for-what-algorithmic-amplification-and-society

I still haven’t posted here, but have been popping my head in here and there… still unsure the tone and genre! Very used to posting on twitter and LinkedIn primarily to promote papers / blogs or to share half formed research thoughts. Here, might try just posting about fun things for a bit?

Hello world!