Claire Benn: Deep Fakes, Pornography, and Consent

Monday, August 5, 3:30pm | Haldeman 41

Political deepfakes have prompted outcry about the diminishing trustworthiness of visual depictions, and the epistemic and political threat this poses. Yet this new technique is being used overwhelmingly to create pornography, raising the question of what, if anything, is wrong with the creation of deepfake pornography. Traditional objections focusing on the sexual abuse of those depicted fail to apply to deepfakes. Other objections—that the use and consumption of pornography harms the viewer or other (non-depicted) individuals—fail to explain the objection that a depicted person might have to the creation of deepfake pornography that utilizes images of them. My argument offers such an explanation. It begins by noting that the creation of sexual images requires an act of consent, separate from any consent needed for the acts depicted. Once we have separated these out, we can see that a demand for consent can arise when a sexual image is of us, even when no sexual activity was actually engaged in, as in the case of deepfake pornography. I then demonstrate that there are two ways in which an image can be ‘of us’, both of which can exist in the case of deepfakes. Thus, I argue: if a person, their likeness, or their photograph is used to create pornography, their consent is required. Whenever the person depicted does not consent (or in the case of children, can’t consent), that person is wronged by the creation of deepfake pornography and has a claim against its production.

Arvind Narayanan: How to Think about AI and Existential Risk

Monday, July 22, 3:30pm | Haldeman 41

Catastrophic and existential risks from AI must be taken seriously. But the current existential risk discourse is dominated by speculation. In this talk, I’ll dissect a series of fallacies that have led to alarmist conclusions, including a misapplication of probability, a mischaracterization of human intelligence, and a conflation of AI models with AI systems. I will argue that we already have the tools to address risks calmly and collectively and provide a set of recommendations for how to do so.
This talk is based on a chapter of the forthcoming book AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor.

Renée Jorgensen: Fairness and Bias in Predictive Policing

Monday, July 15, 3:30pm | Haldeman 41

Over the last decade, many police departments have adopted (and some have abandoned) a suite of algorithmic tools designed to help law enforcement proactively prevent crime. This talk evaluates whether location-based tools (e.g as PredPol/SoundThinking) can be used in a way that is adequately fair. I argue that because they concentrate the risks posed by police activity on specific geographic areas, whether we should use these tools depends not only on whether they can effectively reduce the observed crime rate, but importantly also on whether they can promise greater security for the residents of the most at-risk neighborhoods.

Patricia J Williams: Race, Human Bodies & The Spirit Of The Law

Thursday, June 27, 7:00pm | Norwich Bookstore

Catastrophic and existential risks from AI must be taken seriously. But the current existential risk discourse is dominated by speculation. In this talk, I’ll dissect a series of fallacies that have led to alarmist conclusions, including a misapplication of probability, a mischaracterization of human intelligence, and a conflation of AI models with AI systems. I will argue that we already have the tools to address risks calmly and collectively and provide a set of recommendations for how to do so.
This talk is based on a chapter of the forthcoming book AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor.

About Patricia J Williams

Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School and the former “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” columnist for The Nation. She is a MacArthur fellow and the author of six books, including The Alchemy of Race and Rights. She is currently a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University in Boston.

Ruth Chang: Does AI Design Rest on a Mistake? Thursday, April 4, 2024 4:30pm | Haldeman Hall 41

Two notorious problems plague the development of AI: ‘alignment’, the problem of matching machine values with our own, and ‘control,’ the problem of preventing machines from becoming our overlords, or, indeed, of dispensing with us altogether. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been thrown at these problems, but, it is fair to say, technologists have made little progress in solving them so far. Might philosophers help? In this talk, I propose a conceptual framework for thinking about technological design that has its roots in philosophical study of values and normativity. This alternative framework puts humans in the loop right where they belong, namely, in ‘hard cases’. This framework may go some way in solving both the alignment and control problems.

About Ruth Chang

Ruth Chang is Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford and a member of the Dartmouth class of 1985. Her expertise concerns philosophical questions relating to the nature of value, value conflict, decision making, rationality, love, and human agency. She has shared her research in public venues including radio, television, and newspaper outlets such as National Public Radio, the BBC, National Geographic, and The New York Times. The institutions she lectured or consulted for include Google, the CIA, the World Bank, the US Navy, the Bhutan Center for Happiness Studies, and Big Pharma. Her TED talk on hard choices has over nine million views. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mary Anne Franks: Selling Out Free Speech
October 23, 5 p.m. | Filene Auditorium and Livestreamed

This reductionist and reactionary interpretation of free speech is not contained to the United States, but is rapidly taking hold around the world in part through the tremendous influence of the Internet and related technologies. No industry has benefited more from the sublimation of civil libertarianism into economic libertarianism than the tech industry, which sells the promise of free speech to billions of people around the world in order to surveil, exploit, and manipulate them for profit. The tech industry has accelerated and incentivized life-destroying harassment, irreparable violations of privacy, deadly health misinformation, pernicious conspiracy theories, and terrorist propaganda in the name of free speech.

About Mary Anne Franks

Mary Anne Franks is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at the George Washington University Law School. She is an internationally recognized expert on the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology. Her other areas of expertise include family law, criminal law, criminal procedure, First Amendment law, and Second Amendment law.

Franks is also the president and legislative and tech policy director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating online abuse and discrimination. In 2013, she drafted the first model criminal statute on nonconsensual pornography (sometimes referred to as “revenge porn”), which has served as the template for multiple state laws and for pending federal legislation on the issue. She served as the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s 2018 Uniform Civil Remedies for the Unauthorized Disclosure of Intimate Images Act and frequently advises state and federal legislators on various forms of technology-facilitated abuse. Franks also advises several major technology platforms on privacy, free expression, and safety issues. She has been an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project since 2019.

Dr. Ruha Benjamin: Utopia, Dystopia, or… Ustopia?…
September 20, 5 p.m. | Oopik Auditorium

From automated decision systems in healthcare, policing, education and more, technologies have the potential to deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to harmful practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech predictions with historical and sociological insight. When it comes to AI, Ruha shifts our focus from the dystopian and utopian narratives we are sold, to a sober reckoning with the way these tools are already a part of our lives. Whereas dystopias are the stuff of nightmares, and utopias the stuff of dreams… ustopias are what we create together when we are wide awake.

About Dr. Ruha Benjamin

Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. Her most recent book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize, was born out of the twin plagues of COVID-19 and police violence and offers a practical and principled approach to transforming our communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world.