Podcast Note: Governing AI and Transparency of Tiktok

Hello Folks,
As I am fighting with my procrastination, I gave full rights to myself to not be ashamed of disability of doing anything as a habit. So, I couldn’t send e-mail to my only 1 subscriber last week. I am sorry to my one subscriber, which is also me :D

But I am not disabled on consuming contents on a regular basis. I read and listen a lot of things in this 2 week.

Here we go.

Can we Govern AI?

I am a good follower of Your Undivided Attention podcast and Humane Technology. You probably know them from Netflix documentary of The Social Dilemma.

Here is the last episode of their podcast and my quick notes:

Guest of this show is Marietje Schaake who is International Policy Director at the Cyber Policy Center and was Member of European Parliament for the Dutch Liberal Democratic Party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs, and technology policies between 2009 and 2019.

They talked about budget imbalance between tech giants and governors and more importantly pace difference. AI, as we understood from today, is gonna change in next month. Tech companies work very hard and come up with new features every month, while regulating new technology needs time and attention to every detail.

But we did it every time for every new technology. We succeeded to regulate whole pharmacy, transportation industry and so on. Those were also not so easy. The problem for this time is, developing a new AI model or new hype social media can be done by teenagers in a couple of months, of course with the help of a lot of money.

They also touched the Digital democracy with Audrey Tang in Taiwan as the closest example on real world. Here is a TEDx video of Audrey Tang:

And finally, here 2 minutes of tirade1 from Tristan Harris :) He quickly summarizes what possible solutions can be applied like:

• regulating GPU usage on cloud
• licensing AI development like becoming doctor or lawyer
• Know Your Customer policy for Cloud vendors like Banks.
• Liability regime for big companies

TikTok’s Transparency Problem

Another great episode from your undivided attention. Their guest is Marc Faddoul who is transdisciplinary technologist, expert on recommender systems and algorithmic audit as he wrote on his website. Also, Co-director of Tracking Exposed.

Here are takeaways from me:

After solving transparency problem, we need to focus on the next problem about social media: An alternative paradigm, which should be not profit driven. I have lots of thoughts about that topic, but they are generally in Turkish language and shouldn’t be spoken in English to lots of subscribers.

Oh, shit! I have only 1 subscriber, which is a Turk. Let me quickly trying to summarize my thoughts:

I think, the game should be over for social media companies. I am actually a bit authoritarian when we compare private companies with governments, and having a huge economy so that FAANG companies are richer than most institutions and governments is not acceptable anymore.

Let’s take an example of YouTube. YouTube is mostly the same for the last couple of years. They just added shorts for competing with Instagram and TikTok, and they are earning huge amount of money for just having a marketplace for video contents. I think states and governments should thank to Alphabet and leave that marketplace to the public with an open organization. This will slow down innovation? But if there will be only one competition to create a better content not a competition on being a marketplace and getting lots of ticks, actual social innovation will raise. I don’t have many calculations about the economy of advertising at social media, but just imagine what if we have public and open companies for very common marketplaces like Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, Netflix and so on. Content creators going to earn a lot more. There will be no more innovation on user experience of these marketplaces, but who actually wants to pay more to get distracted more and more? I think we all just want to watch and see quality content.

These are very premature thoughts, and we all need to think more on that problem.

Here is an interesting fact mentioned in Environment Variables podcast:

As I said, I am just trying to gain a good habit and practice in English. Thanks for reading. And final note, I am not using ChatGPT :)