Article by Matt Prewitt and Salomé Viljoen: “AI companies’ need for large tracts of land has, for the first time, given communities a real public forum to push back against Big Tech. But stopping data centers won’t be enough. We must now extend the politics this moment has unleashed and give communities greater power over the future of a technology that will transform them.
AI models inherently concentrate power. They draw information from people and communities everywhere, and give their wielders power to fragment, shape, and manipulate those same communities. They are becoming extraordinarily powerful. Even if they aren’t existentially dangerous, they are not a “normal technology”.
Lawmakers must therefore do their job and regulate AI. A full response to AI’s harms will likely include a range of proposals. We believe one essential component of AI regulation is to move past interventions aimed at harm reduction to mechanisms of redistributing power over setting and directing AI’s future. In a new proposal, we argue for creating a new class of rights governing data use and collection, which makes associations — inspired by the historical structure of guilds, unions, and cooperatives — the wielders of a new class of data rights. These data associations can become the critical counterparties with whom tech companies must negotiate to build their powerful new technologies. We call this approach “associational data rights”.
This proposal aims not at “what” to fix about AI, but “who” to empower over the direction AI development takes. Our proposal creates new legal interests in data, which individuals exercise by assigning them to voluntary, member-governed associations. These associations would then work for their interests on their behalf. Large technology companies would have to negotiate with one or several of these associations in order to get rights to use data, or avoid serious liability.
Central to these new rights is the idea that individuals should be allowed to join and form a new type of special non-stock organization called a Data Rights Association (DRA). Being a member of a DRA would communicate to technology companies that certain rights concerning your data — the right to reasonable privacy, the right to a say in how the information is used, and the right to a fair share of the economic benefits — have been assigned to the DRA as your proxy. Companies would not be allowed to discriminate against DRA members in their service provision, or require terms of service that preclude DRA membership. In a nutshell, companies seeking to use customer data at scale would need to come to terms with a handful of consumer-side organizations with real bargaining power, instead of imposing lopsided terms on divided-and-conquered individuals…(More)”.
