How "Pop Culture Influencing Policy" Stories Can Be Wildly Exaggerated
What's going on is often less than meets the eye.
Longtime readers of Drezner’s World are well aware of my deep, abiding love for popular culture. I co-host a podcast on the intersection of science fiction and political science. I wrote a book on how the zombie genre enables us to think about international relations theory. I wrote a scholarly article on how the tropes of the zombie genre inform public policy debates. I teach a course that includes a module about how popular culture can inform policymaking. The theoretical and empirical scholarly research on this is fascinating — as are the historical anecdotes.
[This is a pretty long wind-up; who do you think you are, Douglas Adams?!—ed. I’m setting the context for my point! Let’s get to it then—ed.]
My point is that I am sympathetic to stories about how pop culture phenomena can influence the way that politicians craft policy — but I am also growing weary of how these stories are often blown up way out of proportion.
To see what I am talking about, let’s look at this week’s news cycle about the Biden administration’s executive order (EO) on artificial intelligence (AI). According to the White House, “The Executive Order establishes new standards for AI safety and security, protects Americans’ privacy, advances equity and civil rights, stands up for consumers and workers, promotes innovation and competition, advances American leadership around the world, and more.”
The first cycle of press coverage tackled the EO from multiple interesting angles. The New York Time Cecilia Kang and David Sanger explained how a lot of Big Tech welcomed the order because, “they are hoping that putting a government imprimatur on some of their A.I.-based products may alleviate concerns among consumers.”1 Politico’s Brendan Bordelon examined the interest group politics behind the order: “[The EO] has something to address nearly every concern about the fast-moving technology — cybersecurity, global competition, discrimination and technical oversight of advanced AI systems…. the vast scale of the order also suggests an effort by the White House to paper over the growing tension between Washington’s rival AI factions.’ Vox’s Sara Morrison took the angle of examining the limits of the executive order compared to what Congress can do.2
Perhaps the most comprehensive reporting was in the Associated Press story by Josh Boak and Matt O’Brien, entitled, “Biden wants to move fast on AI safeguards and signs an executive order to address his concerns,” Boak and O’Brien do a good job of describing what is in the EO and laying out the global and domestic context. The story also discusses how Biden and his White House staff thought through the AI issue. It’s a good, solid piece of reporting with a perfectly anodyne headline.
So how did Biden and his staff develop their thoughts about the executive order? Here is the pertinent section of the AP story:
Last Thursday, Biden gathered his aides in the Oval Office to review and finalize the executive order, a 30-minute meeting that stretched to 70 minutes, despite other pressing matters, including the mass shooting in Maine, the Israel-Hamas war and the selection of a new House speaker.
Biden was profoundly curious about the technology in the months of meetings that led up to drafting the order. His science advisory council focused on AI at two meetings and his Cabinet discussed it at two meetings. The president also pressed tech executives and civil society advocates about the technology’s capabilities at multiple gatherings.
“He was as impressed and alarmed as anyone,” deputy White House chief of staff Bruce Reed said in an interview. “He saw fake AI images of himself, of his dog. He saw how it can make bad poetry. And he’s seen and heard the incredible and terrifying technology of voice cloning, which can take three seconds of your voice and turn it into an entire fake conversation.”
The issue of AI was seemingly inescapable for Biden. At Camp David one weekend, he relaxed by watching the Tom Cruise film “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.” The film’s villain is a sentient and rogue AI known as “the Entity” that sinks a submarine and kills its crew in the movie’s opening minutes.
“If he hadn’t already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about,” said Reed, who watched the film with the president.
In the context of the story, it’s easy to see why Boak and O’Brien included the bits about the MI film. Reed went on the record to talk about it. Readers will know a lot more about your average Mission: Impossible film than they will about artificial intelligence. And that film’s villain is a “self-learning AI”:
The AP story also makes it clear, however, that the film’s role in informing the EO was modest at best. Boak and O’Brien describe a lengthy process that included multiple meetings. Reed’s quote suggested that the film provided an “AI is everywhere” feel more than anything concrete. Indeed, from the quoted one senses that the deepfakes had more of an effect on Biden while the film had more of an effect on Reed.3
So, in context, the Mission: Impossible link was an interesting but hardly critical part of the drafting of the EO. But boy oh boy that was a juicy anecdote. It was inevitable that other news and entertainment outlets would repackage that part of the AP coverage in ways that were sure to exaggerate its importance while simultaneously stripping it of context. That is how SEO headlines work.
Sure enough, other reporting outlets published their own stories based almost entirely on the anecdote originally reported in the AP story.
Think I’m exaggerating? Here are some sample headlines:
Deadline: “Joe Biden’s Concern About AI Grew After Watching ‘Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.’”
Entertainment Weekly: “President Biden signs executive order on AI after watching new Mission: Impossible movie.”
People: “Joe Biden Felt More Pressure to Create AI Safeguards After Watching the New Mission: Impossible.“
IGN: “President Joe Biden Is More Worried About AI After Watching Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning.”
AV Club: “Joe Biden apparently started taking AI seriously after watching Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning.”
The Times of London: “How Mission Impossible stoked Joe Biden’s AI fears.”
All of these headlines suggest that the film inspired the executive order — which, as we know, is not true. If you click on the links, however, you learn that none of these stories contain any information about the EO beyond what was in the original AP story.
With headlines like that, however, this anecdote was destined to rocket around social media — which it surely did. And this is how a small piece of a much larger narrative becomes, through the process of content aggregation, a stylized fact that has only the barest modicum of truth value. It’s not entirely wrong — but it vastly overstates the role that the fictional treatment of AI in the Mission: Impossible film played in setting public policy. That is the bias that scholars and other observers need to remember.
So there.
That said, my colleague Sarah Kreps was skeptical about the federal government’s ability to staff up for this, telling the Times, “It’s calling for a lot of action that’s not likely to receive a response.”
It will be interesting to see if there is any international cooperation on this issue. Surprisingly, the signs this week are cautiously positive.
This is speculative, but if true, props to Biden. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning has some strengths: spectacular stunts, a fantastic Hayley Atwell, and a determined, running Tom Cruise. The Entity as the villain is not one of those strengths.
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