Thank you! This is really helpful in clarifying the governance ‘pipeline’ and thinking about where my own works fits into this. This comment is on what others activities and actors could be included, specially journalists, media organisations and other ‘cultural’ influencers and activities. This comment is based on skimming the piece and on my own intuitions rather than digging too deeply into the evidence base around the role of media and cultural institutions in shaping policy and governance, so might have already considered them and decided there was insufficient evidence to include them.
The map seems to underplay the role of media and cultural actors acting with their own agency, rather than as being influenced by civil society, corporations and government. I can see why they might not be included as their role feels almost one step back from the activities of advocacy, company internal coalition-building, and public relations & communications as you’ve identified them. But their role does seem worth at least nodding to and exploring further.
For example, the section on public relations & comms talks about PR firms, creatives, in-house comms teams but these all seem like industry actors operating on behalf of the AI companies. But another side of the information environment these teams are trying to influence will be media organisations. These organisations will be influenced by those corporate teams but at the same time have their own agendas and leverage their own influence to shape policy outcomes, e.g. Rupert Murdoch’s influence in politics across multiple countries. Investigative reporting by journalists also seems to have the ability to influence opinion among the public and elites, and set the agenda for policymakers.
At another level further back in influencing change, it seems like artists, documentary makers, musicians, popular writers etc. are able to raise the salience of issues among the public and elites through their cultural work. They can both create narratives that might be more intuitive and compelling to non-experts about the importance of an issue and in using their pre-existing popularity to make an issue more visible to their followers. For example, Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth on climate change or the activism by footballer Marcus Rashford on free schools meals in the UK during the pandemic. This feels like an even more indirect route to influencing governance and I’m unsure how impactful it might be in pushing things in a particular direction when it comes to AI, but cultural actors like Asimov, Iain M Banks or (as cliché as it is) the Terminator have seemingly influenced how the public, developers and policymakers view AI, it does seem like another possible omission from the map.
I’m not sure about the magnitude of the interventions by these actors, and whether some of these actions just folded into existing activities, particularly journalists into advocacy, but it does seem at least worth exploring the influence these actors can have.
Thanks Elliot—these are good points. In addition to the popular culture-shaping activities (by media actors and others) that you mention (i), I would add
ii) education activities (forming the future AI developers and other relevant individuals—either through the education system or extra-curricular),
iii) profession-shaping activities (carried out e.g. a professional association of AI developers), and
iv) ideology-shaping activities (e.g. by religious actors).
We decided against including them as I had not witnessed significant influence from these actors on AI governance and therefore didn’t feel confident about explaining this influence (yes, to a certain extent the Cambridge Analytica scandal or France Haugen leaks have been talked about a lot, but they only shifted the mindset of relevant actors on AI because advocates/lobbyists/thinktanks/advisors kept using these scandals as excuse for altering a policy stance. For many policymakers, the scandal was resumed as “facebook = bad company”, not “bad AI”.) One additional source of complexity is that, given their indirect impact, it is difficult to ensure they result in a net-positive impact. For example, Unsafe at Any Speed triggered the American consumer movement but also triggered the Powell Memorandum which arguably resulted in a capture of US policymaking by for-profit interests even to date. However, uncertainty doesn’t mean these activities shouldn’t be considered for impact—especially since they are quite versatile (It’s plausible a skilled journalist could write impactful pieces about AI, pandemics, animal welfare, effective philanthopy and global development throughout her.his career)
Likewise, we faced the question of whether to include EA community-building and grant-making activities as a meta activities influencing AI governance, but that again stretched from “traditional” non-EA definitions of AI governance.
Thank you! This is really helpful in clarifying the governance ‘pipeline’ and thinking about where my own works fits into this. This comment is on what others activities and actors could be included, specially journalists, media organisations and other ‘cultural’ influencers and activities. This comment is based on skimming the piece and on my own intuitions rather than digging too deeply into the evidence base around the role of media and cultural institutions in shaping policy and governance, so might have already considered them and decided there was insufficient evidence to include them.
The map seems to underplay the role of media and cultural actors acting with their own agency, rather than as being influenced by civil society, corporations and government. I can see why they might not be included as their role feels almost one step back from the activities of advocacy, company internal coalition-building, and public relations & communications as you’ve identified them. But their role does seem worth at least nodding to and exploring further.
For example, the section on public relations & comms talks about PR firms, creatives, in-house comms teams but these all seem like industry actors operating on behalf of the AI companies. But another side of the information environment these teams are trying to influence will be media organisations. These organisations will be influenced by those corporate teams but at the same time have their own agendas and leverage their own influence to shape policy outcomes, e.g. Rupert Murdoch’s influence in politics across multiple countries. Investigative reporting by journalists also seems to have the ability to influence opinion among the public and elites, and set the agenda for policymakers.
At another level further back in influencing change, it seems like artists, documentary makers, musicians, popular writers etc. are able to raise the salience of issues among the public and elites through their cultural work. They can both create narratives that might be more intuitive and compelling to non-experts about the importance of an issue and in using their pre-existing popularity to make an issue more visible to their followers. For example, Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth on climate change or the activism by footballer Marcus Rashford on free schools meals in the UK during the pandemic. This feels like an even more indirect route to influencing governance and I’m unsure how impactful it might be in pushing things in a particular direction when it comes to AI, but cultural actors like Asimov, Iain M Banks or (as cliché as it is) the Terminator have seemingly influenced how the public, developers and policymakers view AI, it does seem like another possible omission from the map.
I’m not sure about the magnitude of the interventions by these actors, and whether some of these actions just folded into existing activities, particularly journalists into advocacy, but it does seem at least worth exploring the influence these actors can have.
Thanks Elliot—these are good points. In addition to the popular culture-shaping activities (by media actors and others) that you mention (i), I would add
ii) education activities (forming the future AI developers and other relevant individuals—either through the education system or extra-curricular),
iii) profession-shaping activities (carried out e.g. a professional association of AI developers), and
iv) ideology-shaping activities (e.g. by religious actors).
We decided against including them as I had not witnessed significant influence from these actors on AI governance and therefore didn’t feel confident about explaining this influence (yes, to a certain extent the Cambridge Analytica scandal or France Haugen leaks have been talked about a lot, but they only shifted the mindset of relevant actors on AI because advocates/lobbyists/thinktanks/advisors kept using these scandals as excuse for altering a policy stance. For many policymakers, the scandal was resumed as “facebook = bad company”, not “bad AI”.) One additional source of complexity is that, given their indirect impact, it is difficult to ensure they result in a net-positive impact. For example, Unsafe at Any Speed triggered the American consumer movement but also triggered the Powell Memorandum which arguably resulted in a capture of US policymaking by for-profit interests even to date. However, uncertainty doesn’t mean these activities shouldn’t be considered for impact—especially since they are quite versatile (It’s plausible a skilled journalist could write impactful pieces about AI, pandemics, animal welfare, effective philanthopy and global development throughout her.his career)
Likewise, we faced the question of whether to include EA community-building and grant-making activities as a meta activities influencing AI governance, but that again stretched from “traditional” non-EA definitions of AI governance.