This blog post summarizes the pre-readings and lecture content for Week 5 of Harvard CS 2881r: AI Safety taught by Boaz Barak.

This week’s class focused on content policies: creating effective content & moderation policies, platform governance, and the many challenges of policy enforcement.

Authors’ Intro

Hi, we’re Audrey Yang and MB Crosier Samuel.

Audrey: I’m a Junior at Harvard College studying Computer Science, with a minor in Philosophy. I am intrigued by the intersection between AI safety and ethics, especially in the context of writing and critiquing model specifications and the implications of moral responsibility for noncompliant models. I hope to continue learning about the technical challenges to protecting models from adversarial attacks, as well as challenges of the future regarding the role of AI in society, surveillance, and international affairs.

MB: I’m a second year student in Harvard’s MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences program. I’m particularly interested in the risks and opportunities associated with using AI in the workplace and with untrusted data.

Outline

In this post, we’ll cover [1] the pre-readings for the class, [2] a guest lecture from Ziad Reslan (Product Policy, Open AI), and [3] an in-class experiment around model specs and compliance.

[1] Pre-Readings

This week’s readings focused on content policies and moderation, examining different frameworks of moderation and the challenges to finding a balance between free speech and mitigating harm.

Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve

By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | November 2022

In this blog post, Masnick lays out the typical progression of content moderation policies that new social media platforms tend to follow. His purpose is to codify the content moderation process to some degree, such that new players don’t have to reinvent the wheel and realize the same problems every predecessor found.

Everyone aspires to embrace free speech, he says. This is Level 1.

Soon, unwanted, illegal, unethical content begins to appear. CSAM, copyright infringement, and hate speech are banned. These are Levels 2-4.

Legal issues arise. Some harmful content is slipping through the cracks, while other legitimate content is accidentally being filtered out. Levels 5-9 start to show the impossibility of pleasing all. The word “trustworthy” appears in the slogan for Level 9, but truth is hard...

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