Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! Last week, I finally submitted my final thesis draft to the examining panel. I should get their reports in approximately two months, so (at least until then) this means I can now focus on other stuff. There are a few projects I’ve been planning to start after submitting the manuscript, but, frankly, I’m a bit too tired from the dissertation and worried about the job market to think clearly about them. For now, I will try and read some stuff about those topics to see if I can reboot my brain, and in the meantime I’ll keep working on some events I’m co-organizing before the summer.
So, what does today’s newsletter contain? First, I present a list of reading recommendations, with some slight annotation. Then, I share a few calls for papers, and calls for applications in the general areas of my interest. Finally, I wrap up with a few words and images about my Warhammer hobby. But, before that, here are the usual otters:
Reading recommendations
Habitual readers of this newsletter might notice that I don’t talk often about content moderation and other topics related to platforms. There is a lot to be said about those topics, and they are a critical part of AI regulation, but I don’t feel I have anything to add on the topic beyond the opinions of somebody raised by wolves on the Internet. Still, I must recommend to you a recent paper by Margot Kaminski and Meg Leta Jones, Constructing AI Speech, which goes over the potential legal frames for AI-generated content. In doing so, the authors present a framework (the “legal construction of technology”) that offers an alternative to the classic law & tech formula of “find a technology, write something about how it disrupts the law, and propose how the law can ‘catch up’ with technology”. As my favourite US lawyer would put it, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that, and Kaminski and Jones propose an interesting way forward.
Alicia Solow-Niederman has written an interesting essay on the politics of AI and technical standardization (forthcoming UCLA Law Review). She presents the overarching themes of the ongoing scholarly debates on the politics of technical standardization, showing that such standards are the product of processes in which stakeholders are not guided solely by technical considerations. Discussing how these considerations play out in three concrete examples (from US, China, and Europe), she adds nuance to the legal discussions about standard-based governance of AI technologies, moving beyond the view of standards as objective sources of technical normativity.
For those of you who are applying for research grants or doctoral programmes, or plan to do so in the near future, Luciano Floridi has updated his advice on how to structure a research proposal. It is always good to get your advice from more than one source, but these tips might be a useful starting point for writing applications that capture the attention of the funding sources.
Noema Magazine has published a text by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon in which they argue for the need to “rewild the Internet”. Their proposal builds on the biological metaphors that surround the platform economy (monocultures, ecosystems, etc.) and uses it to offer a vision of how to de-centralize the online world and make it more fruitful, without shying away from the loss of control that entails.
Friso Bostoen and Anouk van der Veer have a new paper (forthcoming in Concurrences) about competition in general purpose AI, asking whether and how GenAI warrants the attention it’s been receiving by competition lawyers and whether any regulatory intervention is best carried out through competition law instruments or requires sui generis instruments.
Finally, recent investigative work by Lighthouse Reports covers one underdiscussed side of migration: how policy barriers prevent skilled workers from finding employment, let alone in the fields they are trained for. The ensuing “brain waste” is a problem both for individual migrants and for the host economies themselves, which lose substantial potential for growth. Overviews of the investigation were published in the Financial Times and El País, and deeper dives are expected to follow.
Opportunities
Max Planck Law is hosting a Transnational Junior Faculty Forum on “Legal Concepts in Transition”. 500-word abstracts by PhD researchers and early-career scholars are due by 1 May 2024, and the event will take place in Berlin on 18–19 September 2024.
The Common Market Law Review is holding its yearly Prize for Young Academics. Scholars under the age of 30, or who have completed their PhD fewer than three years ago, are eligible for participation, and the winner gets an article published in CML Rev and a 500 Euro prize. Full-length articles are due by 15 October 2024.
Olia Kanevskaia at the Utrecht University is leading a summer school on “Global Power and Technology: Competition, Innovation and Technological Advancement through Standardization in the EU”. This seems an excellent opportunity for people interested in the AI Act and the role it ascribes to technical standards. The classes will take place from 15 to 19 July, and the final registration date is 1 June 2024.
Stop! Warhammer time
At the end of the day, doctoral training is a highly individualized experience. For better or worse, my experience in pursuing a PhD as a (slightly) older student is surely different than the experience of my colleagues who started straight after five years of higher education, and it is very different from pursuing a research degree while working in something else as a full-time job. Given those differences, there are very few pieces of advice that have universal validity. But I dare to say that one of them is: find something to do in your spare time that you enjoy doing even if you are bad at it.1
Recently, I’ve been occupying that space with Warhammer 40,000 (WH40k). For those of you who don’t know WH40k, it is a scheme to sell gorgeous but awfully expensive plastic toys sci-fi tabletop game created by Games Workshop, which has given origin to a multi-faceted hobby. The idea behind the game is that you buy plastic miniatures,2 paint them in a cool colour scheme,3 and then play matches against your friends or randos. That game is surrounded by an awfully complex backstory (“the lore”), which I won’t try and summarize here but is mostly explored through the rulebooks to the game and stand-alone fiction books. Additionally, there is lots of licensed materials, such as video games or the forthcoming TV show(s) Amazon is currently developing. In short, WH40k is a hobby that one can pursue in many ways, some of which are more budget-friendly than others.
My first contact with WH40k was in my early teens, when I played a video game called Dawn of War. I liked it, played it a lot, but only found out about the tabletop game a few years later. Once I learned about it,4 I bought a starter kit, giving up pretty soon after finding out I was a terrible painter. So, from 2010 to 2023, my contact with WH40k was limited to some sporadic readings5 and internet memes. It was only last year that I decided to give the tabletop game another try, after meeting a fellow EUI researcher that played it. Since then, I’ve been collecting miniatures, painting them, and playing games from time to time, usually against my wife.
I’m still not a good painter, by any means. Or a player, actually. My hands shake too much when I try to paint details or cut stuff, I sometimes forget important moves I had planned to do,6 and I can get bored easily when painting large armies.7 Still, I enjoy the hobby much more than I did in my previous attempt. In part, this is because I’m better at some tasks: for example, now I have a better grasp of how the paints work and how to combine them.8 Community also is an important factor, as sharing a hobby with friends and my wife makes things much more entertaining. But a large part of my enjoyment comes from the fact that I worry a lot less about being bad at those things, as long as I’m having fun.
Habitual readers of this newsletter will be well aware that I’m not a stickler for detail. I’m not the kind of scholar that is driven by the wish to carve ever more subtle distinctions in the use of a concept, and proofreading can be a pain for me.9 But I’m pretty self-conscious, which means that the final edits of a text often exhaust me more than the rest of the research process put together. This was certainly the case for my thesis. Under these circumstances, it’s always good to have a hobby where I can do half-baked things and still get something good out of it.10 Especially if they do not require me to think about complex stuff when my brain is reduced to jelly after a long day writing.
Of course, this rant was largely an excuse to show my plastic space orks, so here are a few pictures of them. They are still a work in progress, but I’m quite happy with the direction some of them are taking.
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Of course, finding spare time can be very difficult, especially if you are not a full-time doctoral researcher. One thing that helped me a lot during my research masters (which I completed while working full-time and/or completing law school) was the time management advice from The Clockwork Muse. Even then, I could only pull that off thanks to the support of an amazing supervisor, my family, and many advantageous circumstances.
Or, in some cases, “kitbash” them by using spare parts.
Buying paints sold by, inter alia, Games Workshop.
If I recall correctly, they were trying to introduce it in Brazil circa 2010 but the attempt mostly failed, despite Brazil having active markets for stuff such as tabletop RPGs and Magic: The Gathering.
If I’m being honest, mostly TVTropes and Ciaphas Cain novels.
For you Warhammer nerds out there: I keep forgetting to use Da Jump with my Weirdboyz.
Which is why I had started as a Space Marines player: fewer miniatures to paint, with regular paint schemes. However, my wife also liked playing as Spess Mehreens, so my Blood Ravens are now their Blood Ravens, and I’m mostly an Orks player.
Yes, I was a terrible student in Art class, why are you asking?
As a cursory glance at any issue is enough to show that.
Which is also the idea behind this newsletter.