Letters from the Stochastic Penal Colony 🏝

Paper (v1.1, PDF) by Robert Grimm, Independent Investigator, Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Abstract

This paper serves as pointed critique of algorithmic practice outside the criminal injustice system. Far too many interventions including social media's content moderation are excessively punitive, often resulting in the figurative death of users through permanent account suspension. First, based on my own experiences and grounded in procedural justice, this paper starts by exploring the many ways policy and automated enforcement turn punitive on the example of OpenAI's DALL•E 2. Second, it illustrates how even best-practices policy turns punitive performance on the example of pre-Musk Twitter. Third, a comprehensive survey of non-Chinese social media demonstrates the pervasiveness of excessively punitive content moderation. It also tests the limits of their accountability, notably by projecting the likely impact of the European Union's Digital Services Act and by correlating data released by Facebook, Google, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Fourth, to illustrate the limits of algorithmic content moderation, this paper presents a successful strategy for subverting DALL•E's aggressive automated censor, which inadvertently also unleashed grotesquely racist imagery. Fifth, this paper proposes a new intellectual property regime specifically for AI. It re-combines proven elements from copyright and patent law, resulting in a framework that balances the interests of those who invest in state-of-the-art AI and everyone else. Finally, this paper concludes by pointing towards harm reduction as a mindset for, possibly maybe, making life in this digital penal colony at least somewhat bearable—because, I fear, we are stuck in it.

Findings

Highlights of the paper’s findings include:

• Content moderation by all surveyed social media is punitive and excessively so. Social media are on the best way to creating a new underclass of people without a voice on these platforms.
• Content moderation by all surveyed social media runs against the public interest. Particularly prohibitions against misinformation are extremely chilling given pervasive failures by medical experts during the pandemic.
• Transparency reports by all surveyed social media besides Reddit and YouTube suffer from significant data quality issues.
• Transparency disclosures by Meta are so ridden by data quality issues to be wholly untrustworthy and meaningless. Unfortunately, that is the case for Meta’s data disclosures to researchers and customers as well.
• As demonstrated on OpenAI’s DALL•E 2, algorithmic censors based on large language models are vulnerable to a new kind of attack strategy that is hard if not impossible to mitigate.
• As demonstrated on ChatGPT, large language models can significantly simplify and shorten the experiments necessary for that attack, raising significant doubts about the efficacy of AI-based content moderation.
• OpenAI’s DALL•E 2 produces deeply racist images without being prompted to do so, most likely due to a naive diversity mitigation.

The paper explores regulatory responses to this sorry state of content moderation and transparency reporting but rejects them as too punitive. Instead it points towards more subversive, harm-reducing approaches to dismantling the stochastic penal colony. It also proposes a new intellectual property regime for AI that remixes existing, proven copyright and patent provisions to ensure that all of society benefits from this amazing new technology.

Source Code and Supplements

Source code and supplements for the paper “Letters from the Stochastic Penal Colony 🏝” by Robert Grimm.

• A custom build script in the repository root takes care of repetitive tasks. The one optional argument is the name of the task to execute.
• By default, i.e., when invoked without argument, the build script runs pdflatex and bibtex to create the PDF document from the LaTeX files in the source directory.
• Since LaTeX and BibTex are incredibly noisy in their output, the build script contains custom logic to detect actionable warnings and then error out.
• To work with the ACM's new (but arguably not improved) publishing flow, the paper uses only approved LaTeX packages and compiles with pdflatex. To produce my own copies, it also compiles with lualatex when the build script is given the lua argument.
• Unfortunately, that leaves only one subpar option for color emoji, namely simulating them by including graphics files. I wrote my own LaTeX package, emo, to take care of that and then some. Emo is included with the paper sources, but may be outdated. Check out its repository or CTAN.
• Transparency data and Jupyter notebooks with the code for analyzing the data are inside the supplements directory.
• The build script assumes that the virtual environment with Python packages necessary for running the notebooks is contained in the .venv directory. When invoked with the venv argument, it checks whether that directory exists, creating the virtual environment and installing packages otherwise, and then activates the virtual environment.

(C) Copyright 2023 by Robert Grimm

The shell script and Jupyter notebooks included in this repository have been released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Otherwise, all rights are reserved, including for the paper itself.