Michelle L. Ding

Brown University to lead national institute focused on intuitive, trustworthy AI assistants A new institute, based at Brown and supported by a $20 million National Science Foundation grant, will convene researchers to guide development of a new generation of AI assistants for use in mental a...

Very excited to be part of this new AI Institute that is being led by Ellie Pavlick @brown.edu and to be able to work with so many experts, including @datasociety.bsky.social

www.brown.edu/news/2025-07...

A poster for the paper "Position: Strong Consumer Protection is an Inalienable Defense for AI Safety in the United States"

I'll be presenting a position paper about consumer protection and AI in the US at ICML. I have a surprisingly optimistic take: our legal structures are stronger than I anticipated when I went to work on this issue in Congress.

Is everything broken rn? Yes. Will it stay broken? That's on us.

'Sovereignty' Myth-Making in the AI Race | TechPolicy.Press Tech companies stand to gain by encouraging the illusion of a race for 'sovereign' AI, write Rui-Jie Yew, Kate Elizabeth Creasey, Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

With their 'Sovereignty as a Service' offerings, tech companies are encouraging the illusion of a race for sovereign control of AI while being the true powers behind the scenes, write Rui-Jie Yew, Kate Elizabeth Creasey, Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

'Sovereignty' Myth-Making in the AI Race | TechPolicy.Press Tech companies stand to gain by encouraging the illusion of a race for 'sovereign' AI, write Rui-Jie Yew, Kate Elizabeth Creasey, Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

Very excited to see this piece out in @techpolicypress.bsky.social today. This was written together with @r-jy.bsky.social and Kate Elizabeth Creasey (a historian here at Brown), and calls out what we think is a scary and interesting rhetorical shift.

www.techpolicy.press/sovereignty-...

Red Teaming AI Policy: A Taxonomy of Avoision and the EU AI Act The shape of AI regulation is beginning to emerge, most prominently through the EU AI Act (the "AIA"). By 2027, the AIA will be in full effect, and firms are starting to adjust their behavior in light...

So the EU AI Act passed. Companies have to comply. AI regulation is here to stay. Right? Right?

FAccT 2025 paper with @r-jy.bsky.social and Bill Marino (not on bsky) 📜 incoming! 1/n

arxiv.org/abs/2506.01931

Excited to present "Towards AI Accountability Infrastructure: Gaps and Opportunities in AI Audit Tooling" at #CHI2025 tomorrow(today)!

🗓 Tue, 29 Apr | 9:48–10:00 AM JST (Mon, 28 Apr | 8:48–9:00 PM ET)
📍 G401 (Pacifico North 4F)

📄 dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

all welcomes are good welcomes even with a 4 year delay 👍

lol

Also...super grateful & happy to be continuing my research journey at Brown in a CS PhD under @geomblog.bsky.social and @harinisuresh.bsky.social 🌱Many papers to come (?)

yay!!

@michelleding.bsky.social has been doing amazing work laying out the complex landscape of "deepfake porn" and distilling the unique challenges in governing it. We hope this work informs future AI governance efforts to address the severe harms of this content - reach out to us to chat more!

Any synthetic content governance framework or method that aims to target AIG-NCII of adults should also consider their applicability to the malicious technical ecosystem and the three limitations we point out above. More during our presentation at chi-staig.github.io!

3. Adult AIG-NCII specific methods often focus on red teaming general purpose image generation models eg Stable Diffusion. While this is also important, there is an erroneous assumption of a "trustworthy technology" and "malicious users" when in fact the tech itself here is maliciously designed

2. AIG-NCII prevention methods often conflate child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) with NCII of adults. But methods for CSAM (that often work with law enforcement databases) won't be as effective for adults due to different legal protections

1. Transparency methods are very common in synthetic content governance frameworks but they are not enough. DF porn is not the same as other eg. political deepfakes bc human detectable images are still harmful. In fact, many of the deepfake creators label images as "fake" to avoid accountability

Then we review the current landscape of synthetic content governance methods as recorded by NIST AI 100-4 nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ai/... and show 3 key limitations in governing AIG-NCII of adults

Technical prevention is then a challenge for sociotechnical AI governance. In our paper, we break down and map what we call the "malicious technical ecosystem" that is used to create AIG-NCII of adults, including open-source face swapping models and 200+ "nudifier" apps that are free & easy to use

There is a lot of work on responding to AIG-NCII through improved take down mechanisms (eg Take It Down Act) and legal recourse for survivors (eg DEFIANCE Act), but response without prevention places the burden of removal and justice-seeking on survivors and does nothing to stop the creation of NCII

AI generated NCII is a form of image based sexual abuse that results in severe mental, physical, financial, and reputational damage as well as a gendered chilling effect. myimagemychoice.org is an organization that documents this extensively through survivor testimonials

The Malicious Technical Ecosystem: Exposing Limitations in Technical Governance of AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Images of Adults In this paper, we adopt a survivor-centered approach to locate and dissect the role of sociotechnical AI governance in preventing AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Images (AIG-NCII) of adults, coll...

Excited to be presenting a new paper with @harinisuresh.bsky.social on the extremely critical topic of technical prevention/governance of adult AI generated non-consensual intimate images aka "deepfake pornography" at #CHI2025 chi-staig.github.io on 4/27 10:15-11:15 JST arxiv.org/abs/2504.17663 🧵

Independent Bookstore Day - Saturday

Extremely proud to finally launch the SRC Handbook: a project that I began with @geomblog.bsky.social and Julia Netter 1 year ago to bring topics of AI governance, privacy, and accessibility etc. into Brown's CS courses. We now have an interdisciplinary team of 22 students on product/research! 🌷

The 23andME bankruptcy shows why data protection is important. But for genetic data, the problems are even more serious. Genetic data is used in so many places and is collected so widely that there are dangerous leaks everywhere. So much so that we wrote a paper on it. arxiv.org/abs/2502.09716 1/n

Excited to be joining a great lineup of speakers at the Technical AI Governance workshop in Vancouver this summer

If you are working on AI governance, definitely consider submitting!
#ICML2025

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We are excited to announce our 2025 Annual Subscriptions! Don't miss out on your chance to save on this year's titles.

For the first time, we have introduced an annual subscription specifically designed for North America!

www.tiltedaxispress.com/store/2025-uk-print-subscription

🚨Call for Presenters! 🚨
Last semester at the Center for Tech Responsibility, we had a speaker series consisting of grad students presenting their ongoing work on sociotechnical computing (broadly conceived). It was fantastic: a relaxed environment, brief presentations, and lots of discussion. 1/4

"a delightful ride through the world of tech responsibility" should be the new cntr slogan