Tech Talk: Disability Benefits & Algorithms — Talking Tech W/ Lydia X. Z. Brown & Alexandra Givens
CDT’s Tech Talk is a podcast where we dish on tech and Internet policy, while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. You can find Tech Talk on Spotify, SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Play, as well as Stitcher and TuneIn.
We have another exciting show for you this week!
Elections have dominated the headlines, and as our listeners likely know CDT’s been busy on that front –– check out our most recent episode for more! –– but that’s just one of the many issues our experts have been working on.
Today we’re talking with one of the newest of these faces, Lydia X. Z. Brown Policy Counsel with our Privacy and Data Project and a well-established disability advocate – in addition to our CEO Alexandra Givens, to discuss CDT’s latest report on artificial intelligence and benefits determinations.
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
As concern about risks and harms related to AI systems continue to grow, a growing chorus of policymakers, industry leaders, and advocates have called for independent AI assessments. This explainer provides an overview of recent proposals for third-party assessment in the United States, including state and federal legislation, executive actions, and industry proposals.
Having third parties assess AI systems might seem like common sense, but crafting effective policies toward this goal can be devilishly tricky. A poorly-constructed ecosystem for third-party assessment could easily fail to consider the most consequential mechanisms of risk, neglect the AI harms that most impact people, or do more to protect AI companies than people.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
