Computer Says Maybe

More like this: Nodestar: Turning Networks into Knowledge w/ Andrew Trask

So much of tech research happens within the tech industry itself, because it requires data access, funding, and compute. But what the tech industry has in resources, it lacks in independence, scruples, and a public interest imperative. Alix is joined by Brandi Guerkink from The Coalition of Independent Tech Research to discuss her work at a time where platforms have never been so opaque, and funding has never been so sparse

Further Reading & Resources:

• More about Brandi and The Coalition
• Understanding Engagement with U.S. (Mis)Information News Sources on Facebook by Laura Edelson & Dan McCoy
• More on Laura Edelson
• More on Dan McCoy
• Jim Jordan bringing in Nigel Farage from the UK to legitimise his attacks on EU tech regulations — Politico
• Ted Cruz on preventing jawboning & government censorship of social media — Bloomberg
• Judge dismisses ‘vapid’ Elon Musk lawsuit against group that cataloged racist content on X — The Guardian
• See the CCDH’s blog post on getting the case thrown out
• Platforms are blocking independent researchers from investigating deepfakes by Ariella Steinhorn

Disclosure: This guest is a PR client of our consultancy team. As always, the conversation reflects our genuine interest in their work and ideas.

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More like this: Algorithmically Cutting Benefits w/ Kevin De Liban

Luckily people like Soizic Pénicaud are working to prevent the modern welfare state from becoming a web of punishment of the most marginalised. Soizic has worked on algorithmic transparency both in and outside of a government context, and this week will share her journey from working on incrementally improving these systems (boring, ineffective, hard) — to escaping the slow pace of government and looking at the bigger picture of algorithmic governance, and how it can build better public benefit in France (fun, transformative, and a good challenge).

Soizic is working to shift political debates about opaque decision-making algorithms to focus on what they’re really about: the marginalised communities who’s lives are most effected by these systems.

Further reading & resources:

• The Observatory of Public Algorithms and their Inventory
• The ongoing court case against the French welfare agency's risk-scoring algorithm
• More about Soizic
• More on the Transparency of Public Algorithms roadmap from Etalab — the task force Soizic was part of
• La Quadrature du Net
• France’s Digital Inquisition — co-authored by Soizic in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports, 2023
• AI prototypes for UK welfare system dropped as officials lament ‘false starts’ — The Guardian Jan 2025
• Learning from Cancelled Systems by Data Justice Lab
• The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment — by Nari Johnson et al, featured in FAccT 2024

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More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI and Journalism w/ Nic Dawes

We talked to a global expert and leading voice on this issue for the past 20 years, Sam Gregory to get his take. We started way back in 1992 when Rodney King was assaulted by 4 police officers in Los Angeles. Police brutality was (and is) commonplace, but something different happened in this case. Someone used a camcorder and caught it on video. It changed our understanding about the role video could play in accountability. And in the past 30 years, we’ve gone from seeking video as evidence and advocacy, to AI slop threatening to seismically reshape our shared realities.

Now apps like Sora provide impersonation-as-entertainment. How did we get here?

Further reading & resources:

• More on the riots following Rodney King’s murder — NPR
• More about Sam and Witness
• ObscuraCam — a privacy-preserving camera app from WITNESS and The Guardian Project
• C2PA: the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity
• Deepfakes Rapid Response Force by WITNESS

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Post Production by Sarah Myles

More like this: Reanimating Apartheid w/ Nic Dawes

This week Alix is joined by Nic Dawes, who until very recently ran the non-profit newsroom The City. In this conversation we explore journalism’s new found toxic relationship with AI and big tech: can journalists meaningfully use AI in their work? If a model summarises a few documents, does that add a new layer of efficiency, or inadvertently oversimplify? And what can we learn from big tech positioning itself as a helpful friend to journalism during the Search era?

Beyond the just accurate relaying of facts, journalistic organisations also represent an entire backlog of valuable training data for AI companies. If you don’t have the same resources as the NYT, suing for copyright infringement isn’t an option — so what then? Nic says we have to break out of the false binary of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them!’

Further reading & resources:

• Judge allows ‘New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI to go forward — NPR
• Generative AI and news report 2025: How people think about AI’s role in journalism and society — Reuters Institute
• An example of The City’s investigative reporting: private equity firms buying up property in the Bronx — 2022
• The Intimacy Dividend — Shuwei Fang
• Sam Altman on Twitter announcing that they’ve improved ChatGPT to be mindful of the mental health effects — “We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but…”

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More like this: Defying Datafication w/ Abeba Birhane

Alix sat down with Nabiha Syed to chat through her first year as the new leader of Mozilla Foundation. How does she think about strategy in this moment? What role does she want the foundation to play? And crucially, how is she stewarding a community of human-centered technology builders in a time of hyper-scale and unchecked speculation?

As Nabiha says, “restraint is a design principle too”.

Plug: We’ll be at MozFest this year broadcasting live and connecting with all kinds of folks. If you’re feeling the FOMO, be on the look out for episodes we produce about our time there.

Further reading & resources:

• Watch this episode on YouTube
• Imaginative Intelligences — a programme of artist assemblies run by Mozilla Foundation
• Nothing Personal — a new counterculture editorial platform from the Mozilla Foundation
• More about Mozfest
• Nabiha on the Computer Says Maybe live show at the 2025 AI Action Summit
• Nabiha Syed remakes Mozilla Foundation in the era of Trump and AI — The Register
• Nabiha on why she joined MF as executive director — MF Blog

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