First look: Youth-led coalition of digital natives launches 'AI Policy Platform' ahead of 2024
First look: Youth-led coalition of digital natives launches 'AI Policy Platform' ahead of 2024
A youth-led ‘AI Policy Platform’ meant to guide regulation around artificial intelligence. Charts exposing current generational disparities on American values. And this week's youth vote headlines.
Ahead of the 2024 election, Design It For Us — a coalition of Big Tech accountability advocates focused on making the internet safer for young people — has built an ‘AI Policy Platform’ meant to guide regulation around artificial intelligence.
Design It For Us launched its AI framework, shared first with The Up and Up, to proactively fight against the type of mis and disinformation shared online ahead of the 2024 election. They called this a “watershed moment” in the growth and development of AI and the efficacy of its regulation — pointing to fake robocalls impersonating President Joe Biden earlier this election cycle as one example of how the technology is already disrupting our political ecosystem.
The AI Policy Platform, geared at proactively informing decision makers’ thinking and legislating around AI, includes seven key principles:
“The responsibility for safety rests on AI companies.”
“Give young people a meaningful seat at the table.”
“Address the business model.”
“Adhere to strict transparency and reporting requirements.”
“Promote suitable use of AI without preventing or blocking its benefits.”
“Provide access to AI technologies in the classroom, with clear, strict restrictions and guidance.”
“Ensure AI technologies are not being used to replace human skills.”
Here’s what they’re saying 🗣
To learn more about the impetus for launching the AI-specific proposal, I checked in with two of the digital natives at the helm of today’s announcement. Here’s some of what they had to say:
Neha Shukla, a core team member of Design It For Us, chair at the World Economic Forum’s Generation AI Youth Council, and the author of ‘A Kids Book About AI’ said the group launched the policy platform now, before it’s too late, to get ahead of potential harms caused by AI.
“Young people are often at the very receiving end of a lot of these harms,” she said. “What we’re fighting for with this policy platform is making sure we’re being mindful of protecting young people, of mitigating harms, examining risks — not just right before releasing [a product] or even worse, right after it happens, but right at conception, at the idea of developing these platforms. [We’re] making sure companies are being held accountable.”
“Algorithmic discrimination is a big priority of tackling the teen mental health crisis. So it's really addressing the issue of AI from lots of different intersectional angles.”
Implications for 2024, and beyond…
Shukla worries about internet user’s ability to detect AI-altered news headlines at a time when trust in media is already at a low.
“We're seeing new armies of websites spawning every single day that are churning out hundreds and hundreds of AI generated articles at a pace that is so difficult to keep up with, and those articles are perfectly SEO [search engine optimization] generated, so they’re actually coming up very high on Google. The challenge that we’re facing is the public has such little AI literacy and an understanding of what is AI generated and what is not,” Shukla noted. “It’s creating a two-fold problem where one, a majority of people have very bad digital hygiene in terms of understanding is this AI generated or not? And the second challenge it’s creating is making people lose trust in all journalism and questioning everything… it’s creating a lot of confusion.”
Zamaan Qureshi, Design It For Us co-chair
Qureshi warns about the impact of ‘shallow fakes,’ which are hard for anyone to decipher, even digitally native young voters.
“The same actors in the social media space are the same actors in the AI space… the consistent effort to gobble up people's data and control the marketplace means that there's only a few companies who end up pretty much dictating what all of us are seeing ahead of the 2024 election,” he said. “I think what we're gonna see is a push towards ‘shallow fakes’ on social media ahead of the election, where there will be slight changes to the way that candidate is delivering a message …, [it will be] so slight that you won't even be able to detect it.”
“Ahead of the election or on Election Day, we're going to see a lot of different attempts to try and suppress votes. If we don't have clear public policy guidelines in place for what social media companies and what AI companies can allow and not allow on their platforms, young people are going to be the ones most at risk, because we are the consumers of content on these platforms,” Qureshi said.
I pushed back on Qureshi by asking if and how young people would be uniquely positioned to catch these ‘shallow fakes,’ given this generation’s digital upbringing. He cautioned that while young people are at times able to detect misinformation because of their familiarity growing up with the internet, lawmakers still have a responsibility to regulate big tech by providing guard rails to prevent against the spread of misinformation for all of their users.
“The onus should not be on young people to have to try and detect every deep fake or digitally altered content on platforms. This is the responsibility of lawmakers, and it's the responsibility of these companies to start to implement safeguards that actually protect us,” Qureshi said.
Zooming out: As you may remember, Design It For Us is the same group that launched a policy platform last year aimed at making the internet safer for young people. Qureshi said Design It For Us’ new AI policy platform is “complementary” to that of a coalition called Encode Justice, which has already rolled out its own plan for “global AI action by 2030,” called AI 2030. That proposal has been signed by youth-led groups including Design It For Us and Voters of Tomorrow, as well as a number of other signatories.
Some data: Before announcing its own AI policy framework, Design It For Us teamed up with liberal think tank Data for Progress to better understand how likely US voters (of all ages) are thinking about AI regulation. The data was collected between May 15-16, 2024. Here’s what they found, shared first with The Up and Up.
86% of voters agree that AI companies “should enact policies that clearly and publicly outline how their tools are created and what they are used for.”
67% of voters also support AI tools like Snapchat’s ‘My AI’ “undergoing certain safety checks and third-party testing before they are used.”
After hearing about new AI tools that are being rolled out in classrooms in the upcoming Fall semester, nearly 9 in 10 voters want these tools to “undergo safety checks and third-party testing before students can use them.”
📚 Read more about how young people may be interfacing with AI on big tech platforms: Snapchat tried to make a safe AI. It chats with me about booze and sex., Geoffrey A. Fowler for The Washington Post, 03/14
In case you missed it: Viral charts about the current generation gap 📊
On Sunday, ‘Age of Disruption’ author published a series of six infographics showing generational disparities; these graphics were picked up by Axios for underscoring major differences in how Gen Z views the country and key facets of American life as compared to their older counterparts.
With his summary, Mehlman shows a generation gap between Gen Z and Baby Boomers when it comes to values such as “patriotism,” a “belief in god/religion,” and “having children,” as well as whether or not the generation believes America is the “best place to live,” how likely the generation is to vote, and more.
I’ve covered many of these generational differences (like a generational gap in happiness) in previous editions of The Up and Up. If you’ve found these generational divides interesting, it’s definitely worth reading Mehlman’s post and seeing the charts he compiled all in one place.
Youth vote in the news 🗞
On Campus, a New Social Litmus Test: Zionist or Not?, Joseph Bernstein for The New York Times, 05/22
The Voters Who Don’t Really Know Donald Trump, Russell Berman for The Atlantic, 05/21
Biden campaign to hire meme manager as president struggles for support from young voters, Mallory Wilson for The Washington Times, 05/21
And a new initiative 👀
GBH News Series Politics IRL Showcases Gen Z Voters, GBH News, 05/21: “GBH News is giving viewers a front row seat on young voters’ discussions about the biggest issues of the 2024 election and what will inspire them to vote — or not. The new video series Politics IRL features young adults sitting face to face, often with someone who disagrees with them, hashing out their opinions.”