Welcome!
Thanks for checking out our website. We are a new student and faculty group at the University of Minnesota founded by 5 law students with backgrounds ranging from computer science to economics. We created this group to discuss the latest advances in AI and their implications to public policy and the law. We believe AI has a high probability of becoming a deeply disruptive technology, regardless of whether it remains solely a productivity boosting tool, or eventually achieves general intelligence.
How can we deal with AI-generated misinformation? How strongly should we regulate the creation of AI models? Should copyright holders be able to bar their content from being included in AI model training? How quickly will AI develop–is it an existential threat, or simply hype? What can policymakers do if we create an AI model powerful enough to automate most–or even all–white collar work? These are all questions we are interested in, and hope to discuss.
Our goal is to create a conversation among future changemakers, regardless of their academic discipline. Our group is focusing on recruiting graduate students from all disciplines, but motivated undergraduates, and curious professors are welcome to join as well.
If you’re interested in joining, please contact Phil Ableidinger at ablei009@umn.edu to get on our mailing list and stay up to date on our meetings.
What's the time commitment?
Given our group is so new, and the academic commitments our members have, we are currently planning on running a discussion group once every 2 to 3 weeks, with a handful of assigned readings for each meeting. In total, we hope to keep the time commitment of membership to only an hour or two a week, on average.
In the future, depending on interest and the speed of technological advance, we may expand the group into taking on a more active role in legislative advocacy.
What are the readings going to be?
If you have any ideas, we would love to hear your recommendations, and we would love to have you at our meetings.
At the moment, we only have a partial list of readings for the first few meetings. These include a paper discussing various AI scenarios from the think tank Third Way, a brief research paper on AI performance trends from the think tank METR, and the ubiquitous (and polarizing) paper AI-2027.
We are targeting the end of September or start of October 2025 for our first meeting somewhere on the University campus.