New readings, upcoming events
Focused on AI and law, this time, plus the usual cute animal pictures
Hello, dear readers! Today’s issue will be pretty short: due to time constraints, I did not write about interdisciplinary research in law & tech as originally planned. Instead, the last few weeks were dedicated to following a teacher training course, getting anxious about academic job markets, and finishing a draft chapter for my thesis. Each of these things will appear at some point in future issues, but today, I will instead focus on sharing things.
First, here’s a photo of Winnie looking cute:
Now, I would like to talk about two upcoming events. First, the DRAILS group organizes a seminar series on various topics about AI and its regulation. Last week, I had the opportunity to discuss with them my work on regulation by design, and I think you should join Emmie Hine’s presentation next Monday (25 June, 13:00 CET), in which she will discuss AI governance in the US and China.
The second event is the Lawtomation Days conference, organized by the IE School’s Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence for Law and Automation on 28 and 29 September. I will present part of my ongoing work on technology neutrality and the problem of technical transparency on AI, and quite a few readers of the newsletter will be presenting their work there, too. If you are in Madrid, please join us and say hi!
To stay on the topic of self-promotion, a GDPR commentary to which I’ve contributed has just been published by Nomos-Verlag! In this volume, edited by Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann, Vagelis Papakonstantinou, Gerrit Hornung, and Paul De Hert, you can find contributions by various authors. My contribution (with Giovanni Sartor and Juliano Maranhão) consists of three chapters: a longer commentary on Article 25 GDPR on data protection by design and by default, a shorter assessment of Article 4(5) on the concept of pseudonymization (and the related notion of anonymization), and a brief discussion of the legal bases for content personalization in online platforms.
Moving on to the work of otter people, readers might be interested in two recent reports about AI. The first one, published by EPIC, looks at how state and local governments in the US have outsourced various administrative tasks to AI providers. Among its many interesting findings, we have the reinforcement of a point that I always try to drive home in this context: focusing solely on the usual Big Tech suspects might lead us to overlook the major corporate actors that actually dominate these markets (and, consequently, shape the privatization of public power).
The second report is the Competition and Markets Authority’s assessment of AI foundation models. While I remain critical of “foundation model” as a term for policy and legislation, the report itself is fascinating in terms of engaging a broad range of stakeholders and mapping the challenges to (and limits of) the competition and consumer protection legal frameworks.
Readers who are interested in competition and digital markets should also check out Simonetta Vezzoso’s working paper on the role of compliance by design in the DMA. She identifies how the use of technical measures is likely to play an essential role in the everyday life of DMA enforcement, zooming into the most salient issue for design measures: interoperability in messaging services.
Readers interested in administrative law should check this recent empirical paper by Christie Lawrence, Isaac Cui, and Daniel Ho, presented at AIES 2023. The authors rely on publicly available information to assess whether US federal agencies have complied with governance mandates about transparency. While I am unconvinced that a lack of state capacity explains the results the authors map (unless we broaden the concept to encompass things such as adversarial compliance), their methodology shows the promise and pitfalls of communication-based transparency in the public sector.
Finally, here is a Giant Otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), an endangered species that, like me, comes from the Amazonian region. This particular individual, however, was photographed in Peru.
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