In this post, I'll touch briefly on some of the emerging socio-legal and policy challenges that I worked on during my project with the AI, Media, and Democracy Lab. I'll also detail some of the ways in which my community engagement work was directed towards developing bottom-up solutions to these problems--and how those solutions were inspired through vigorous and instructive conversation with community stakeholders.

Generative artificial intelligence technologies have become much more powerful over the past few years: ChatGPT and its sibling LLM programs have unleashed numerous social, economic, and political ruptures that will take years to properly understand. But many of their gravest repercussions are urgent, and effective public policy measures have (unfortunately, but predictably) been slow to respond. EU regulators were the first to draft up comprehensive measures aimed at minimizing the risks of AI systems, but even these are acknowledged by many to be insufficient and unduly influenced by national actors and corporate interests. My project this summer looked at how the new regulatory environment has impacted European news media organizations, across several important spheres of ethical and organizational practice: media transparency/accountability, copyright, and information safety, among others. This work put me in contact with stakeholders in the (local/regional) media and civil society spaces; I had several powerful and interesting conversations with members of the European AI/media/data governance communities about the work that has already been done on these issues and how they imagine the trajectory of the next few years of public and private AI governance.

One of the things that surprised me in my conversations was an unexpected but acute awareness of my own American identity--something I rarely ever consider or acknowledge during my daily life in the States, even when confronted with non-American ideas or people (perhaps it's true what they say about Americans being self-centered...). This heightened awareness did not come (principally) from my being treated differently by those I interacted with but rather due to my gradual realization that, on account of my American acculturation, I saw the world differently in several subtle but important ways. I was unconsciously committed to a number of values and frameworks that simply did not translate to the EU context. This challenge of having certain ideas "lost in translation" made fully effective communication slightly difficult at the start of my stay, since while I had a very good grasp on events in the Eurozone on a formal, factual level, I couldn't fully inhabit the more immaterial and culturally-situated elements of the discourse, such as how local media groups conceptualized their relationship with the state, or how civil society activists negotiated the impacts of their work on both a national and trans-national (EU-wide) level. 

Still, it was not difficult to find points of convergence, and I quickly learned that the easiest way to discover these similarities was simply to listen. I had a lot of opportunities to do this: both in 1-on-1 conversations and by sitting in on talks and conferences that gave me a better lay of the (intellectual, cultural, and political) land. I learned how to draw on my experience with national AI policy (or the lack thereof) in the US as a contrast to the more robust (if imperfect) European approach. And I learned how to engage critically with other perspectives without fruitlessly drawing on a background set of historical facts that I could not properly understand or articulate on account of my own cultural remove. Most of all, I came out of these conversations with the conviction that many of the foundational ethics and values issues are shared between civil society groups in the US and EU: most of the concrete policy goals are even identical, despite the different regulatory constraints under which different groups must operate. The experience as a whole gave me hope that I could successfully take much of what I learned back to the US in order to push for more comprehensive regulatory proposals.