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Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · 1d

New blog (a recap post): "How collective bargaining for information, public AI, and HCI research all fit together." Connecting these ideas + a short summary of various recent posts (of which there are many, perhaps too many!). On Substack, but also posted to leaflet

Reposted by Nick Vincent

Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 6d

V interesting twist on MCP! “user data is often fragmented across services and locked into specific providers, reinforcing user lock-in” - enter Human Context Protocol (HCP): “user-owned repositories of preferences designed for active, reflective control and consent-based sharing.” 1/

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Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · 6d

Also just saw this paper this week and was similarly quite excited and thinking along similar lines!

RSL: Really Simple Licensing

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · 28d

Anyone compiling discussions/thoughts on emerging licensing schemes and preference signals? eg rslstandard.org and github.com/creativecomm... ? externalizing some notes here datalicenses.org, but want to find where these discussions are happening!

The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet

rslstandard.org

About the workshop – ACA@NeurIPS

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 14

Excited to be giving a talk on data leverage to the Singapore AI Safety Hub. Trying to capture updated thoughts from recent years, and have long wanted to better connect leverage/collective bargaining to the safety context.

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 14

About a week away from the deadline to submit to the

✨ Workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action (ACA) ✨

acaworkshop.github.io

at NeurIPS 2025!

acaworkshop.github.io

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 8

Follow up, tying together "AI as ranking chunks of human records" with "eval leverage" and "dataset details as quality signals": dataleverage.substack.com/p/how-do-we-...

And related, "eval leverage": dataleverage.substack.com/p/evaluation...

How do we know our AI output is good? Double checks, bar charts, vibes, and training data.

Connecting evaluation and dataset documentation via the lens of "AI as ranking".

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 8

(1) ongoing challenges in benchmarking, (2) challenges in communicating benchmarks to the public, (3) dataset documentation, and (4) post-hoc dataset "reverse engineering"

The original post: dataleverage.substack.com/p/selling-ag...

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 8

who paid that Dr for a verified attestation with provenance can use this attestation as a quality signal; a promise to consumers about the exact nature of the evaluation. A "9/10 dentists recommend" for a chatbot.

More generally, I think there are interesting connections between current discourse &

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 8

For some types of info, we can maybe treat as open and focus on selling convenient/"nice" packages (ala Wikimedia Enterprise)

But attestations provide another object to transact over. Valuable info (a Dr giving thumbs up/down on medical responses) may leak, but the AI developer

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 8

So in a post-AI world, to help people transact over work that produces information, we likely need:
- individual property-ish rights over info (not a great way to go, IMO)
- rights that enable collective bargaining (good!)
- or...

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 8

The core challenge: many inputs into AI are information, and thus hard to design efficient markets for. Info is hard to exclude (pre-training data remains very hard to exclude, but even post-training data may be hard without sufficient effort)

Oh Canada! An AI Happy Hour @ ICML 2025 · Luma

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 8

It looks like some skepticism was warranted (not much progress towards this vision yet). I do think "dataset details as quality signals" is still possible though, and could play a key role in addressing looming information economics challenges.

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Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Aug 8

🧵In several recent posts, I speculated that eventually, dataset details may become an important quality signal for consumers choosing AI products.

"This model is good for asking health questions, because 10,000 doctors attested to supporting training and/or eval". Etc.

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Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Jul 16

Around ICML with loose evening plans and an interest in "public AI", Canadian sovereign AI, or anything related? Swing by the Internet Archive Canada between 5p and 7p lu.ma/7rjoaxts

Whether you're Canadian or one of our friends from around the world, please join us for some drinks and conversation to chat about life, papers, AI, and...…

lu.ma

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Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Jun 24

Finally, I recently shared a preprint that relates deeply to the above ideas, on Collective Bargaining for Information: arxiv.org/abs/2506.10272, and have a blog post on this as well: dataleverage.substack.com/p/on-ai-driv...

On AI-driven Job Apocalypses and Collective Bargaining for Information

Reacting to a fresh wave of discussion about AI's impact on the economy and power concentration, and reiterating the potential role of collective bargaining.

Algorithmic Collective Action With Two Collectives [crosspost]

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Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Jun 24

And we have a blog post on algorithmic collective action with multiple collectives! dataleverage.substack.com/p/algorithmi...

This post was written by Aditya Karan, with support from Nick Vincent and Karrie Karahalios to accompany a FAccT 2025 paper. It was originally published on Jun 19, 2025 via the Crowd Dynamics Lab blog...

Each Instance of "AI Utility" Stems from Some Human Act(s) of Information Recording and Ranking

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Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Jun 24

These blog posts expand on attentional agency:
- genAI as ranking chunks of info: dataleverage.substack.com/p/google-and...
- utility of AI stems from people: dataleverage.substack.com/p/each-insta...
- connection to evals: dataleverage.substack.com/p/how-do-we-...

It's ranking information all the way down.

Algorithmic Collective Action with Two Collectives | Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

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Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Jun 24

[FAccT-related link round-up]: It was great to present on measuring Attentional Agency with Zachary Wojtowicz at FAccT. Here's our paper on ACM DL: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

On Thurs Aditya Karan will present on collective action dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... at 10:57 (New Stage A)

You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.

dl.acm.org

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Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Jun 24

“Attentional agency” — talk in new stage b at facct in the session right now!

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Jun 21

Off to FAccT; Excited to see faces old and new!

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · Jun 5

Another blog post: a link roundup on AI's impact on jobs and power concentration, another proposal for Collective Bargaining for Information, and some additional thoughts on the topic:

dataleverage.substack.com/p/on-ai-driv...

On AI-driven Job Apocalypses and Collective Bargaining for Information

Reacting to a fresh wave of discussion about AI's impact on the economy and power concentration, and reiterating the potential role of collective bargaining.

Each Instance of "AI Utility" Stems from Some Human Act(s) of Information Recording and Ranking

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · May 28

Post 2: dataleverage.substack.com/p/each-insta...

It's ranking information all the way down.

Nick Vincent @nickmvincent.bsky.social · May 27

Do some aspects seem wrong (in the next 2 posts, I get into how these ideas interact w/ reinforcement learning)?