It's remarkable how early Ford Foundation was to law and technology in the midcentury

this is what you see moments before going down a cyberspace and law rabbit hole

it finally happened (my 3090 overheated and emergency shut off)

Here’s the article. I’ve had more positive feedback on it than things I spent a year on. Apparently describing a problem that thousands of Trust and Safety people are seeing but also see the world ignoring is a good way to win hearts and minds :) www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...

At the Kernel 5 issue launch!

After having such a great time at #CHI2025 and #FAccT2025, I wanted to share some of my favorite recent papers here! I'll aim to post new ones throughout the summer and will tag all the authors I can find on Bsky. Please feel welcome to chime in with thoughts / paper recs / etc.!! 🧵⬇️:

i am launching a magazine with @kevinbaker.bsky.social and the rest of the reboot collective on thursday at gray area! you should be there! open.substack.com/pub/reboothq...

I've arrived in the 🌁Bay Area🌁, where I'll be spending the summer as a research fellow at Stanford's RegLab! If you're also here, LMK and let's get a meal / go on a hike / etc!!

Well, this was a nice surprise. Download it while it’s hot! lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/...

I am presenting a new 📝 “Bias Delayed is Bias Denied? Assessing the Effect of Reporting Delays on Disparity Assessments” at @facct.bsky.social on Thursday, with @aparnabee.bsky.social, Derek Ouyang, @allisonkoe.bsky.social, @marzyehghassemi.bsky.social, and Dan Ho. 🔗: arxiv.org/abs/2506.13735 (1/n)

I am so excited to be in 🇬🇷Athens🇬🇷 to present "A Framework for Auditing Chatbots for Dialect-Based Quality-of-Service Harms" by me, @kizilcec.bsky.social, and @allisonkoe.bsky.social, at #FAccT2025!! 🔗: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04419

🎉Excited to present our paper tomorrow at @facct.bsky.social, “Characterizing Bias: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Simplified versus Traditional Chinese”, with @brucelyu17.bsky.social, Jiebo Luo and Jian Kang, revealing 🤖 LLM performance disparities. 📄 Link: arxiv.org/abs/2505.22645

I am at FAccT 2025 in Athens, feel free to grab me if you want to chat.

Please come see us at the RC Trust Networking Event! You can sign up with the QR Codes around the venues and get some free drinks! 🙂‍↕️ #FAccT2025

New paper available - "Bureaucratic Backchannel: How r/PatentExaminer Navigates #AI Governance" which investigates how examiners navigate dual roles through a qualitative analysis of a Reddit community where U.S. Patent & Trademark Office employees discuss their work🔗📜👇

Llama 3.1 70B contains copies of nearly the entirety of some books. Harry Potter is just one of them. I don’t know if this means it’s an infringing copy. But the first question to answer is if it’s a copy at all/in the first place. That’s what our new results suggest: arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546

Another hallucinated citation in court. At this point, our tracker is up to ~70 cases worldwide of hallucinated citations in court, including hallucinations from 2 adjudicators. New Case: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... Tracker: www.polarislab.org/ai-law-track...

Three years ago, we released “American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century.” The report describes the surveillance apparatus that Trump is using to target immigrants, activists and anyone else who challenges his agenda. We’re re-releasing it today with a new foreword.

Had a great time presenting this paper, cowritten with Sireesh Gururaja and Lucy Suchman! Paper draft here: arxiv.org/abs/2411.17840

OK this keeps getting better. It’s not just that the FTC is moderating content uploaded in user comments as part of its “platform censorship” inquiry. It’s re-moderating the same content the platforms moderated, as @corbinkbarthold.bsky pointed out. x.com/corbinkbarth... 1/

From concerns about social media addiction to urgent civil liberties issues, courts are asking scientists to be arbiters of alleged technology harms. How can scientists reliably inform courts and how can courts interpret our work? New article with @penney.bsky.social tsjournal.org/index.php/jo...

Why do scientists still struggle to answer basic questions about the safety of digital tech from AI to social media, even as families point to rising evidence of individual harm with concern & grief? @orbenamy.bsky.social & I have a new article in @science.org: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"surveillance deputies"(Brayne, Lageson & Levy, 2023).

Trying something new: A 🧵 on a topic I find many students struggle with: "why do their 📊 look more professional than my 📊?" It's *lots* of tiny decisions that aren't the defaults in many libraries, so let's break down 1 simple graph by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social 🔗 www.ft.com/content/73a1...

@kennypeng.bsky.social also built a website to explore results on Yelp, headlines, & Congress datasets: hypothesaes.org. You can see every SAE neuron in UMAP space, colored by whether the neuron correlates positively or negatively with the target variable. 8/

💡New preprint & Python package: We use sparse autoencoders to generate hypotheses from large text datasets. Our method, HypotheSAEs, produces interpretable text features that predict a target variable, e.g. features in news headlines that predict engagement. 🧵1/

They're called public records for a reason. Starting today, WIRED will *stop paywalling* articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, becoming the first publication to partner with @freedom.press to offer this for our new coverage.

✨New Work✨ by me, @allisonkoe.bsky.social, and @kizilcec.bsky.social forthcoming at #CHI2025: "Don't Forget the Teachers": Towards an Educator-Centered Understanding of Harms from Large Language Models in Education 🔗: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14592

Please repost to get the word out! @nkgarg.bsky.social and I are excited to present a personalized feed for academics! It shows posts about papers from accounts you’re following bsky.app/profile/pape...

Who has the piece connecting California Mission Revival and Silicon Valley evangelism?

I'm looking for technical postdocs or impact fellows (visiting PhD, research engineer, or summer fellow/intern). Format/topics are flexible (priorities below), but biggest thing I'm prioritizing: a track record and interest in open source contributions & impact! forms.gle/j7p3DDWQf5zo...

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people: 18f.org

ah the joy of reading bug reports

I am hiring a summer law fellow for my group! If you're pursuing a law degree and want to spend some time on legal/policy writing this summer—with the goal of an academic publication, like a law review article—please reach out! forms.gle/izNtBtEwiZaU...

New AI Law & Policy Update from me and @dbateyko.bsky.social! 🖼️Copyright litigation & policy developments 📈Llama ablation studies revealed during litigation 🤖ChatGPT for gov ➕and more. Subscribe for more AI law & policy updates! Link: www.ailawpolicy.com/p/prompts-au...

What's wild is that a lot of these are completely routine natural science grants that someone threw a DEI word onto for broader impact purposes.

On February 20, please join The Privacy Center and the Department of Philosophy for a conversation with Antón Barba-Kay and Lowry Pressly (@lowrypressly.bsky.social), the authors of two provocative new books about the nature of digital technology.

Kicking off my stint on bluesky by sharing this piece @gwbstr.com and I put together on China’s new AI safety institute, created ahead of next week’s Paris AI Action Summit

The NYT article cites our 2022 report, American Dragnet, which explains how ICE has accessed datasets containing detailed personal records on the vast majority of people in the US. Read it here: americandragnet.org

"Privacy harms may seem theoretical on paper, but they're never theoretical for vulnerable people on the front lines," Distinguished Fellow @jshermcyber.bsky.social told @nytimes.com about the surveillance tech that could fuel immigration enforcement during Trump 2.0. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/t...

A coming flood of federal grant proposals will claim AI makes projects cheaper & better. Many will be empty promises. This admin needs to place the best bets it can on AI. For the Federation of American Scientists' Day One Project, my memo on AI grant governance fas.org/publication/...

a plea to please get specific — the term DEI erases context. • is testing to see if pulse oximeters work poorly for black Americans "DEI"? or is it making sure products work for everyone? • is testing to see if lab PPE works poorly for women "DEI"? or is it making sure everyone in an ER is safe?

How can scientists provide courts with reliable evidence in tech litigation? @mwoluchem.bsky.social interviewed researchers, civil society, & litigators CAT Lab convened to ask this question. Here's her report: A Collective Front Toward Platform Accountability citizensandtech.org/2025/01/scie...

the cool thing about trying to do legal research is that a one-page law can have a 40-year history of debate, derailing you for two hours when all you wanted was a simple yes/no answer for your draft

freakin' sweet

New AI Law & Policy update! ©️ Copyright litigation news. ⚖️ USPTO, Buenos Aires courts, and other gov entities continue expanding use of AI. 🤖 YOLO11 compromised on PYPI so that it runs crypto mining (don't worry it's patched). 📰 Are AI terms of use enforceable? www.ailawpolicy.com/p/ai-terms-o...

👋 @upturn.org is hiring a Research Associate — ideal for someone who is excited about sharp, interdisciplinary research on a range of topics related to technology and justice. application deadline: 1/31/25 www.upturn.org/join/researc...