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Algorithmic Opacity, Private Accountability, And Corporate Social Disclosure In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, Sylvia Lu Dec 2020

Algorithmic Opacity, Private Accountability, And Corporate Social Disclosure In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, Sylvia Lu

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Today, firms develop machine-learning algorithms to control human decisions in nearly every industry, creating a structural tension between commercial opacity and democratic transparency. In many of their commercial applications, advanced algorithms are technically complicated and privately owned, which allows them to hide from legal regimes and prevents public scrutiny. However, they may demonstrate their negative effects—erosion of democratic norms, damages to financial gains, and extending harms to stakeholders—without warning. Nevertheless, because the inner workings and applications of algorithms are generally incomprehensible and protected as trade secrets, they can be completely shielded from public surveillance. One of the solutions to this …


People V. Robots: A Roadmap For Enforcing California's New Online Bot Disclosure Act, Barry Stricke Jan 2020

People V. Robots: A Roadmap For Enforcing California's New Online Bot Disclosure Act, Barry Stricke

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Bots are software applications that complete tasks automatically. A bot's communication is disembodied, so humans can mistake it for a real person, and their misbelief can be exploited by the bot owner to deploy malware or phish personal data. Bots also pose as consumers posting online product reviews or spread (often fake) news, and a bot owner can coordinate multiple social-network accounts to trick a network's "trending" algorithms, boosting the visibility of specific content, sowing and exacerbating controversy, or fabricating an impression of mass individual consensus. California's 2019 Bolstering Online Transparency Act (the "CA Bot Act') imposes conspicuous disclosure requirements …


The Very Brief History Of Decentralized Blockchain Governance, Michael Abramowicz Jan 2020

The Very Brief History Of Decentralized Blockchain Governance, Michael Abramowicz

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

A new form of blockchain governance involving the use of formal games that incentivize participants to identify focal resolutions to normative questions is emerging. This symposium contribution provides a brief survey of the literature proposing and critiquing the use of such mechanisms of decentralized decision-making, and it evaluates early laboratory and real-world experiments with this approach.