Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig on why AI and social media are causing a free speech crisis for the internet

This is the best summary I could come up with:

He’s taught law for more than 30 years at the University of Chicago, Stanford, and Harvard; he co-founded the Creative Commons in 2001; and he’s published a dozen books since 1999 delving into the intersection of communications, money, the media, the internet, and democracy itself.

The launch event for the lab was a glitzy affair featuring a number of guest speakers, including former President Barack Obama, who was set to join Decoder and talk about how social media can actually benefit democracy and how we might build toward that goal.

You’ll hear us agree that the internet at this moment in time is absolutely flooded with disinformation, misinformation, and other really toxic stuff that’s harmful to us as individuals and, frankly, to our future as a functioning democracy.

Absolutely, but the question is, if you are sitting there watching week-by-week engagement numbers, Taylor Swift invested a long time in building the brand that would make it so that she could be an oracle of something good and true, and it’s not —

Some people say, “When the algorithm decides to feed me stuff that makes me believe that vaccines don’t work, that’s just like the New York Times editors choosing to put certain things on the op-ed page or not.”

There is one way that the current moment in AI could come to an end, and I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you specifically about it, which is: All of these LLMs are built on vast amounts of training data scraped from the open internet.

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