Public panel discusses academic validators and kill-switch risks
Julia Stoyanovich says academia must lead the charge because the city lacks expertise, and that oversight must be public oversight. Nate Soares praises the organizations that investigated Hugging Face, and Nathan Sheard warns against kill switches being used to chill speech.
Thank you.
So I don't think it's unexpected that I would say this, being that I am an academic.
I think that academia have to lead the charge on this, right?
Because one of the things we're seeing in the city is that there simply isn't enough expertise to be able to oversee these systems.
And ultimately, our goals should be...
To bring as much information as possible into public view.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, right?
So really, oversight has to be public oversight.
Does anyone else want to take that?
I'd add that the folks who, the third parties who investigated the hugging face incident seem to me to have done a good job.
And my guess is that they're overworked right now.
I think those were the organization's meter and Redwood research, but they seem to have done a good job so far.
I think it's an excellent question, who is the right party?
And I don't have a great answer for that.
What I would like to say, though, is there's still research being done on the efficacy of kill switches.
What I caution the council to think about is the risk of a kill switch being used
as a tool to chill on popular speech.
And so really thinking through to make sure that as we think about the ways that we want to provide the right protections for New Yorkers, that we're also not building tools that in the future could be used to harm people's essential liberties.