Thursday, June 12, 2025

Now AI tools are being imposed on us, and we even get to pay for the privilege (either with our data or with our money), whether we want them or not. What can be done?

Obviously, I don’t have the answer. If you're waiting for antitrust to step in (is it exploitative behaviour? bundling? is there "choice"? what’s the relevant market?), see you in 10 years, perhaps. What about data protection authorities? What happened with Meta's legitimate interest push to swallow up our data is frustrating to say the least (fully agree with Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider ).

The example of Wikipedia editors pushing back against AI generated summaries is instead encouraging. As part of effective regulatory frameworks, we need to devise ways for AI-affected people/humans to express their voice, mechanisms we can’t even fully envisage yet, both at the public institutional level (learnings from the Dutch scandal?) and in private institutions (Mitrechtsomething) or market settings (UI, choices, data portability, etc.).