Tech Talk: Pam Samuelson Highlights the Impact of Tech Law & Policy Clinics
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 an amazing episode of Tech Talk for you. First, we chat with the iconic Pam Samuelson, one of the visionaries behind technology law and policy clinics. These clinics are helping answer some of today’s most pressing legal questions around tech and society. Pam tells us more about how they got started and their incredible current work.
After that, we hear from CDT Policy Counsel Natasha Duarte about changes that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to make to its rules against housing discrimination. HUD wants to make it harder to challenge housing discrimination, especially when it’s caused by algorithms. Not surprisingly, CDT strongly disagrees.
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.
