SMASH BLOGGING with Tara Wheeler: Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act | Tim Cushing writing in TechDirt yesterday

 

"I’m smashblogging on a Saturday because I came across this story on FedScoop, which discusses the Biden Administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy’s launch of a public request for comment on their upcoming AI policy work. I wanted to Say A Few Words.
The story does not contain a link to the actual request itself...So unnamed senior government sources that I angrytexted (they also noted the complexity of finding this) found this link here.

Oh, says I. So intuitive. So clear to all Americans that obviously some place called Federal Register is where that request for public comment would be. So I check it out, and actually, there’s a link in that document that says I have to go to regulations.gov. I hit that link and guess what: it takes me to regulations.gov. No link to the actual thing I’m looking for. But there’s a search bar. Masochistically, I type in “ai” which, obviously, nets me literally-literally 51,704 results..."

White House Wants Your Comments On AI Policy, But Doesn’t Want You To Find Out How

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the we-want-your-comment-if-you-can-find-how-to-submit-it dept

Fri, Jun 16th 2023 03:31pm - Mike Masnick

Via Tarah Wheeler (who just destroyed the EARN IT Act recently) we find out that, while the White House has announced that it wants public comment on AI regulation, it hasn’t made it at all easy to figure out how to actually comment. . .

Tarah eventually tracks down the actual link by searching for the document number, but notes that trying to search for it almost any other way would fail.

But could I have found it another way? Normal humans might try searching “ai” or “artificial intelligence”; what would their experience be like?

Maybe after searching “ai” the “Only show documents open for comment” checkbox filter will get me somewhere?

Ooo, the top result looks promising; looks like the NTIA wants some AI accountability. Cool, but that’s not what I’m looking for.

This is… bad. It’s bad government. It’s bad technology. It’s bad as a way of asking for help. Yes, the government is often slow and not great in its adoption of new technology, but at this point there’s no excuse for not having a system like this just work.

Still, just for fun, I figured I’d ask an AI to help me find it. I started with Bing… and it did not point me to the right place (it also found that NTIA comment request, but not the OSTP one):

Google Bard was, well, worse, telling me it “can’t assist with that.” Thanks for nothing, bot.

So then I tried another AI powered answerbot, Perplexity, and got the following:

• The beginning (and the Perkins Coie) link is again about the NTIA, but the second link (huzzah!) is actually a PDF at Whitehouse.gov talking about about the actual OSTP request. 
• But it’s just a PDF version of the link that a fed person sent Tarah which… again… doesn’t have the link to where to actually provide the comment.

Anyway, once again, the actual place to leave a comment is here. And now if we can just find a place to let the White House make it easier to find where to comment.

Filed Under: ai, federal register, ostp, public comments

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