Director of Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology responds to school president's plan to make genAI central

[highplainsdem]

Info on Emily Tucker here: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/privacy-technology-center/about-us/people/emily-tucker-2/

Emily Tucker is the Executive Director at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, where she is also an adjunct professor of law. She shapes the Center’s strategic vision and guides our programmatic work. Emily joined the Center after serving as a Teaching Fellow and Supervising Attorney in the Federal Legislation Clinic at the Law Center. Before coming to Georgetown, Emily worked for ten years as a movement lawyer, supporting grassroots groups to organize, litigate, and legislate against the criminalization and surveillance of poor communities and communities of color. She was Senior Staff Attorney for Immigrant Rights at the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), where she helped build and win state and local policy campaigns on a wide range of issues, including sanctuary cities, language access, police reform, non-citizen voting, and publicly funded deportation defense....

-snip-

Her open letter to students, posted on Medium.yesterday:

https://medium.com/center-on-privacy-technology/an-open-letter-to-georgetown-students-in-response-to-recent-announcements-about-generative-ai-8869dcd523ef

An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements by the University about “Generative AI”

-snip-

I was not surprised to learn that Georgetown, like most American colleges and universities, has succumbed to the pressure to appear part of the “AI” in-crowd (and to the temptation of the resources being made available to those in that crowd). But even though everything I have done in my professional life has been in some way based on the expectation that institutions will tend towards corruption, corrosion and capture, when I think about what this particular instance of that phenomenon signifies for you, the students of Georgetown, I feel very sad and angry. And I decided that the best thing to do with that sadness and anger would be to write to you all directly about why this decision by your university, which may seem on the surface to be an example of garden variety corporate thoughtlessness, should disturb you deeply, and provoke you to fight back.

The first thing you should know is that most of the information being funneled to you about the technologies marketed as “AI” is purposely distorted and does not reflect what has actually been established about the tech, the industry that produces it, or its social, political, economic, and environmental impacts. There is a robust and fast-growing body of interdisciplinary research that comprehensively debunks the claims that tech companies — and those who shill for them — make about these products, and exposes the global corporate power grab that these claims are being used to enable.

-snip-

I am not suggesting you should resist a chatbot education because I expect you to have a smooth path at Georgetown if you do. It’s definitely risky. And I’m not saying you should resist in spite of the risk. I’m saying you should resist because of the risk. The risk is what helps you remember, at a moment when everyone in authority is (or worse, is pretending to be) suffering from the insane delusion that the future of humanity depends on a computer program that generates probabilistic text strings, that there is something that learning is for, that thinking is for, that work is for, and that you are for, the discovery of which belongs to you. If you start now taking risks that help you remember this, you may become the kind of person who cannot be pushed around by bullies and autocrats, or manipulated by propaganda, or satisfied by a life lived solely for the sake of self-protection and self-enrichment.

I’m taking a risk too by writing you this letter. I don’t have tenure at Georgetown. Right now I don’t even have an academic appointment. I could be fired at any moment for any reason. The existence of the center I run depends entirely on my ability to raise money from philanthropic foundations, many of which have publicly endorsed some version of “AI” investment. I’m not sure how what I have written here will impact the future of the Privacy Center and the urgently important work we do. I’m not confident that many of my colleagues would support me were I to face negative consequences.

-snip-

I noticed already three years ago that teachers and artists were on the front lines opposing generative AI and its dangers, and speaking up to defend humanity against those peddling pro-AI propaganda and falling for it. They were the canaries in the hellish genAI coal mine - the ones whose work had been most obviously stolen to train AI, and the ones best positioned to see the effect of genAI on human minds and learning.

Emily closes her letter saying she hopes that "someone who is more powerful than I am, whose job is safer, will — for your sake — speak up about what a shameful and embarrassing capitulation this is, and say something about how it connects to the political collapse we are all living through in this country right now."

If anyone here has any voice or influence at Georgetown, please offer her your support. This is an existential fight.

[highplainsdem]

1. kick