Audrey Tang on How regular citizens fixed an AI deepfake crisis

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former digital minister, makes the case for d/acc, the decentralized, differential, defensive approach to accelerating AI that keeps power in the hands of citizens rather than a handful of frontier labs.

We talk about how Audrey went from organizing a parliamentary occupation to running Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, her framework for accelerating some AI capabilities while deliberately slowing others, and how a 447-person citizens’ assembly used deliberative democracy to draft Taiwan’s deepfake scam legislation in just a few months, cutting deepfake ads by 94%.

Audrey also lays out her vision for civic AI: local, community-owned systems that keep people in control instead of ceding power to centralized platforms, and explains why she believes being a “good enough ancestor” for future generations matters more than trying to perfectly optimize the future.

This episode is part of our AI Pathways series, where we explore the choices we can still make about how AI gets built and governed. You can watch the other episodes here:    • AI Pathways