Unpacking India’s New AI Advisory

India's government is intensifying its scrutiny of foreign tech companies ahead of national elections.  A recent directive from India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) mandates explicit government permission for deploying “under-tested” or “unreliable” AI models and software for Indian users. The advisory requires AI systems to be labeled...
Image representing the conceptual shift in platform governance and market dynamics from the Apple App Store to the OpenAI GPT Store.

OpenAI’s GPT Store: New Competition in the Global Digital Economy

OpenAI's recently launched GPT store potentially marks a significant shift in the global digital economy landscape, presenting a viable competitive threat to established platforms like Apple's App Store. Competition in the global digital economy is all about creating platforms that bring different sides of a market together to create value....

From Black to White: Dissecting Propaganda in Nuclear Emergencies, Finding Governance Solutions  

Disinformation during emergencies (DiE) can critically undermine government efforts to mitigate socioeconomic harm and damage the relationship between the state and citizens. With the production of nuclear power growing in multiple countries and widespread concern over generative-AI-fueled disinformation online, we are researching the impact of DiE on transnational nuclear emergency responses....

The Narrative: November 1, 2023

Dispatches from the evolving digital political economy AI Governance: Empty Gestures? The US government released an AI Executive Order October 31. The Halloween release comes after a year-long FUD campaign, backed partly by businessmen with a vested interest in AI, that frames AI as a frightening new technology that poses...

The Narrative: October 1, 2023

Dispatches from the evolving digital political economy Taiwan Internet Governance Forum Taiwan will hold its own Internet Governance Forum a week before the UN IGF in Kyoto, Japan, which Taiwanese will not be allowed to attend. Organized around the theme “Critical Moment: Fragmentation, Geopolitics, AI Revolution and Resilience,” the program...

The Narrative: September 1, 2023

Reports on the evolving digital political economy Human Authorship and AI Images A lot of bad policy about AI is being made because people are overstating its risks. These overstatements usually derive from overestimating the autonomous nature of the AI. Now we are getting some bad law for the same...

The Basic Fallacy Underlying the AI Panic

For the past two months, we've seen a sudden burst of panic about the social implications of Artificial Intelligence. One cannot help but note, with a mix of resignation and amusement, that the loudest noises are coming from computer scientists involved in AI. To some people, these sources lend an...

Scale, performance, and industrial organization in AI

Scaling properties have shown time and again to be important to networked communication. Think of the introduction of switches in early telephone exchanges, improvements in time or code division multiplexing in wireless or optical networks, or packet switching on the Internet, all of which impacted the networks’ size, performance, and...