Jamal Awil

← Five-Year Plan

PhD Year 3 · Fall 2030

Aug 26 – Dec 13, 2030 · 4 courses

AI labor & creative economies, disability & sociotechnical justice, frontier AI/IP

PHD-807 — PHD 807 · AI, Labor, and the Creative Economies

PHD pillar · PhD Year 3 · Fall 2030

Course MOC. Reading list compiled from the 5-year curriculum.

Essential books

  • ★ Gray & Suri — Ghost Work
  • ★ Alex Rosenblat — Uberland
  • ★ Veena Dubal — 'On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination'
  • ★ Trebor Scholz — Uberworked and Underpaid
  • ★ Acemoglu & Johnson — Power and Progress

Supplementary books

  • ☆ Mark Banks — Creative Justice
  • ☆ Brooke Erin Duffy — (Not) Getting Paid
  • ☆ Daniel Susskind — A World Without Work
  • ☆ Brynjolfsson & McAfee — Second Machine Age
  • ☆ Alexandrea Ravenelle — Hustle and Gig

Papers (40)

1. Vallas, S., & Schor, J. B. (2020). What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy Annual Review of Sociology

2. Sundararajan, A. (2014). Peer-to-Peer Businesses and the Sharing (Collaborative) Economy: Overview Working Paper, NYU Stern

3. Woodcock, J., & Graham, M. (2019). The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction Polity Press

4. Schor, J. B., Attwood-Charles, W., Cansoy, M., Ladegaard, I., & Wengronowitz, R.. Dependence and Precarity in the Platform Economy Theory and Society

5. Kenney, M., & Zysman, J. (2016). The Rise of the Platform Economy Issues in Science and Technology

6. Dubal, V. B. (2023). On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination Columbia Law Review

7. Lee, M. K., Kusbit, D., Metsky, E., & Dabbish, L. (2015). Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

8. Kellogg, K. C., Valentine, M. A., & Christin, A. (2020). Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control Academy of Management Annals

9. Ajunwa, I., Crawford, K., & Schultz, J. (2017). Limitless Worker Surveillance California Law Review

10. Hannak, A., Wagner, C., Garcia, D., Mislove, A., Strohmaier, M., & Wilson, C. (2. Bias in Online Freelance Marketplaces: Evidence from TaskRabbit and Fiverr Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)

11. Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2019). Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

12. Casilli, A. A. (2017). Waiting for Robots: The Reconfiguration of Human Labour in AI Development Travail et Emploi

13. Tubaro, P., & Casilli, A. A. (2019). Micro-Work Journal of Industrial and Business Economics

14. Dzieza, J. (2023). AI Is a Lot of Work New York Magazine / The Verge

15. Newton, C. (2019). The Trauma Floor: The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America The Verge

16. Irani, L. C., & Silberman, M. S. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

17. Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2011). Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries Routledge

18. Duffy, B. E. (2016). The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries International Journal of Cultural Studies

19. Banks, M. (2017). Creative Justice: Cultural Industries Rowman & Littlefield

20. McRobbie, A. (2002). Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds Cultural Studies

21. Oakley, K. (2014). Good Work? Rethinking Cultural Entrepreneurship Handbook of Management and Creativity

22. Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2017). The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? Technological Forecasting and Social Change REQUIRED.

23. Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2019). Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor Journal of Economic Perspectives

24. Autor, D. H., Levy, F., & Murnane, R. J. (2003). The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration Quarterly Journal of Economics

25. Susskind, R., & Susskind, D. (2015). The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts Oxford University Press

26. Danaher, J. (2019). Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work Harvard University Press

27. Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2014). The Second Machine Age: Work W. W. Norton

28. Wajcman, J. (2017). Automation: Is It Really Different This Time? British Journal of Sociology Cross-pillar tags: LAW, COMM, EQ, PHD

29. Scholz, T. (2016). Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

30. Cant, C. (2019). Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy Polity Press

31. Cherry, M. A. (2016). Beyond Misclassification: The Digital Transformation of Work Comparative Labour Law & Policy Journal

32. Johnston, H., & Land-Kazlauskas, C. (2018). Organizing On-Demand: Representation Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 94

33. Posada, J. (2022). Embedded in the Artworld: The Datafication of Creative Labour through AI Art Systems Big Data & Society

34. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Proceedings of the ACM FAccT Conference

35. Hao, K. (2023). The People Inside Your Machine MIT Technology Review

36. Liang, W., Zhang, Y., Kwon, H., Negahban, S., & Zou, J. (2022). Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning NeurIPS 2022

37. Casilli, A. A., & Posada, J. (2019). The Platformization of Labor and Society Society and the Internet

38. Fisk, C. L. (2009). Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property University of North Carolina Press

39. Lemley, M. A. (2011). IP in a World Without Scarcity New York University Law Review

40. Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism Polity Press

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Egan, J. (2022). The candy house. Scribner.

[AI + Communication + Equity] Egan's loose sequel imagines "Own Your Unconscious," a tech that allows users to upload their memories to a collective archive. The pillars synthesize through privacy refuseniks ("eluders"), the communication-platform politics of memory ownership, and the inequities of who can afford anonymity. The novel braids consent, IP-in-memory, and platform sociality. A definitive cross-pillar fiction for the 2020s. XD Okorafor, N. (2010). Who fears death. DAW.

[Equity + Communication + AI] In a post-apocalyptic Sudanese future, Onyesonwu, a mixed-race girl conceived in violence, undertakes a journey to confront the wizard who orchestrated her people's genocide. Okorafor binds genocidal communication weapons (the "Great Book"), proto-AI computer remnants, and gendered racial inequity. The pillars meet in the burning archive. A canonical Africanfuturist cross-pillar novel. XD Tokarczuk, O. (2017). Drive your plow over the bones of the dead (A. Lloyd-Jones, Trans.). Riverhead. (Original work published 2009)

[Communication + Equity] An aging Polish woman, devoted to astrology and animal rights, narrates a series of deaths in a remote village. Tokarczuk binds the communication politics of marginal speech (the protagonist is dismissed as "crazy") to the equity question of who can be heard. The pillars meet in her astrological dispatches. XP Whitehead, C. (2011). Zone one. Doubleday.

Illuminates Equity: Whitehead's literary zombie novel set in post-plague Manhattan is a study in how disaster capitalism reorganizes labor. Placed beside scholarship on platform precarity, Zone One illuminates how cleanup, sorting, and waste work — the lowest-status jobs in any infrastructure — are always racialized and feminized. A cross-pollination for thinking about content moderation as zombie work.

Nonfiction

XD O'Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Crown.

[AI + Equity + Communication] O'Neil writes from inside finance and tech to describe how "WMDs"—opaque, scaled, damaging algorithms—reproduce inequity in education, credit, employment, and policing. The pillars synthesize in the popular communication of an algorithmic audit. A bestselling cross-pillar text. XD Nakamura, L. (2007). Digitizing race: Visual cultures of the Internet. University of Minnesota Press.

[Equity + Communication + AI] Nakamura analyzes the visual semiotics of race online, from avatars to pregnancy boards. The pillars synthesize in the screenshot. A canonical text. XD Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1990)

[Equity + Communication] Glissant's poetics of opacity and relation argues for the right to refuse transparency to colonial communication regimes. The pillars synthesize in the "Right to Opacity" chapter. A foundational text for cross-pillar communication ethics. XP Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism (G. Elliott, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published in French)

Illuminates Equity: Boltanski and Chiapello's sociology of post-1968 management discourse is a cross-pollination text for platform-management critique.

PHD-808 — PHD 808 · Disability, Accessibility, and Sociotechnical Justice

PHD pillar · PhD Year 3 · Fall 2030

Course MOC. Reading list compiled from the 5-year curriculum.

Essential books

  • ★ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson — Extraordinary Bodies
  • ★ Alison Kafer — Feminist, Queer, Crip
  • ★ Sami Schalk — Bodyminds Reimagined
  • ★ Elizabeth Ellcessor — Restricted Access
  • ★ Piepzna-Samarasinha — Care Work

Supplementary books

  • ☆ Jonathan Sterne — Diminished Faculties
  • ☆ Mara Mills — 'On Disability and Cybernetics'
  • ☆ Goggin & Newell — Digital Disability
  • ☆ Whittaker et al. — Disability, Bias, and AI
  • ☆ Os Keyes — 'Counting the Countless'

Papers (50)

1. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (2011). Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept

2. Davis, Lennard J. (2013). Introduction: Disability, Normality, and Power" (Introduction to The Disability Studies Reader)

3. Linton, Simi (1998 (reprinted 2006)). Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity" (excerpt/article version)

4. McRuer, Robert (2002). Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence

5. Goodley, Dan (2011). Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction" (chapter: "The Disabled Subject")

6. Meekosha, Helen; Shuttleworth, Russell (2009). What's So 'Critical' About Critical Disability Studies?

7. McRuer, Robert (2006). Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability" (introductory chapter)

8. Kafer, Alison (2003). Compulsory Bodies: Reflections on Heterosexuality and Able-Bodiedness

9. Schalk, Sami (2013). Coming to Claim Crip: Disidentification with/in Disability Studies

10. Sins Invalid Collective (Berne, Patricia, et al.) (2015). 10 Principles of Disability Justice

11. Puar, Jasbir K. (2012). The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability

12. Mingus, Mia (2011). Access Intimacy: The Missing Link

13. Clare, Eli (2013). Body Shame, Body Pride: Lessons from the Disability Rights Movement

14. Ellcessor, Elizabeth (2014). Blurred Lines: Accessibility, Disability, and Definitional Limitations

15. Goggin, Gerard; Newell, Christopher (2007). The Business of Digital Disability

16. Williamson, Bess (2012). Electric Moms and Quad Drivers: People with Disabilities Buying, Making, and Using Technology in Postwar America

17. Sanfilippo, Maddalena; Fichman, Pnina; Yang, Shuo (2017). Multidimensionality of Online Trolling Behaviors

18. Alper, Meryl (2017). Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality" (excerpt/article)

19. Keyes, Os (2019). Counting the Countless: Why Data Science Is a Profound Threat for Queer People

20. Whittaker, Meredith; Alper, Meryl; Bennett, Cynthia L.; Hendren, Sara; Kaziunas,. Disability, Bias, and AI

21. Bennett, Cynthia L.; Keyes, Os (2020). What Is the Point of Fairness? Disability, AI and the Complexity of Justice

22. Trewin, Shari (2018). AI Fairness for People with Disabilities: Point of View

23. Hutchinson, Ben; Smart, Andrew; Hanna, Alex; Denton, Emily; Greer, Christina; Pe. Unintended Machine Learning Biases as Social Barriers for Persons with Disabilities

24. Madaio, Michael A.; Stark, Luke; Wortman Vaughan, Jennifer; Wallach, Hanna (2020. Co-Designing Checklists to Understand Organizational Challenges and Opportunities Around Fairness in AI

25. Shah, Nithya; Singh, Monisha; Taddeo, Mariarosaria; Floridi, Luciano (2023). How Do AI Ethics Guidelines Address Persons with Disabilities?

26. Ben-Moshe, Liat (2018). Dis-epistemologies of Abolition

27. Berne, Patricia (2015). Disability Justice — A Working Draft

28. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi (2018). Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access" (excerpt from Care Work)

29. Eubanks, Virginia (2011). Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age" (excerpt: "The Digital Divide as Participatory Exclusion")

30. Hamraie, Aimi (2013). Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design

31. Mitra, Sophie (2006). The Capability Approach and Disability

32. Areheart, Bradley A.; Stein, Michael Ashley (2015). The ADA at 25 and Employment of People with Disabilities

33. Band, Jonathan (2013). The Marrakesh Treaty: Facilitating Access to Books for the Blind and Others with Print Disabilities

34. Helfer, Laurence R.; Land, Molly K.; Okediji, Ruth L.; Reichman, Jerome H. (2017. The World Blind Union Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty

35. Lazar, Jonathan; Goldstein, Daniel F.; Taylor, Anne (2015). Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy" (excerpts)

36. Goldfarb, Stephen E. (2000). Disability Rights and the Internet: Section 508 and Beyond

37. Perlin, Michael L. (2007). International Human Rights and Mental Disability Law: When the Silenced Are Heard

38. Lid, Inger Marie (2014). Universal Design and Disability: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

39. Hamraie, Aimi; Fritsch, Kelly (2019). Crip Technoscience Manifesto

40. Mills, Mara (2011). On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller, Norbert Wiener, and the Hearing Glove

41. Sterne, Jonathan (2017). Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment" (excerpt/article)

42. Petrillo, Marianna (2018). The Hearing Aid as Media: Tracing the Cultural History of Auditory Prosthetics

43. Fritsch, Kelly (2015). Gradations of Debility and Capacity: Biocapitalism and the Neoliberalization of Disability Relations

44. Hendren, Sara (2014). All Technology Is Assistive: Six Design Rules on Disability

45. Jackson, Steven J.; Pompe, Alex; Krieshok, Gabriel (2012). Repair Worlds: Maintenance, Repair, and ICT for Development in Rural Namibia

46. Bennett, Cynthia L.; Rosner, Daniela K. (2019). The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the 'Other

47. Moeller, Susan D. (2012 (verify)). Media Coverage of Disasters and Disabilities: Reporting Protocols, Stereotypes and Silences

48. Ellcessor, Elizabeth; Kirkpatrick, Bill (2017). Introduction: Toward a Disability Media Studies

49. Richardson, Rashida; Schultz, Jason M.; Crawford, Kate (2019). Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice

50. Costanza-Chock, Sasha (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" (excerpt: "Design Practices: 'Nothing About Us Without Us'")

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Powers, R. (2018). The overstory. W. W. Norton.

[Communication + Equity + AI] Powers braids nine human lives with the longer life of trees, and a key strand features a programmer building Mastery, a series of life-simulation games that mirrors the data-driven flattening of ecological intelligence. The pillars synthesize in how communication networks—digital and arboreal—are co-opted by extraction. The novel argues that AI and forests share a problem: human inability to listen to non-human intelligence in conditions of inequity. XD Okorafor, N. (2015). The book of Phoenix. DAW.

[AI + Equity + IP] A genetically engineered "accelerated" woman named Phoenix wakes inside Tower 7, a corporation experimenting on Black bodies, and burns her way to freedom. Okorafor binds biotech IP (Phoenix is corporate property), AI surveillance, and the equity politics of human-experimentation. The pillars meet in Phoenix's manuscript-as-bomb. A prequel to Who Fears Death that sharpens the cross-pillar argument. XD Adichie, C. N. (2025). Dream count. Alfred A. Knopf.

[Equity + Communication] Adichie's first novel in over a decade braids four Black women across continents and includes a stark, sustained account of a hotel-housekeeper's accusation of a major political figure (modeled on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case). The pillars synthesize through the communication politics of who is believed and the inequity of legal procedure across borders. The novel's polyphonic structure is itself an argument about whose voice counts. XP Egan, J. (2010). A visit from the goon squad. Knopf.

Illuminates Communication/IP: Egan's novel of music-industry characters, including a chapter rendered as PowerPoint slides, is a study in formal experiment with platform-shaped attention. Placed beside platform-studies scholarship, Goon Squad illuminates how literary form responds to media form. The Sasha-Lincoln chapters anticipate Twitter and TikTok narrative grammar by years.

Nonfiction

XD Mayer-Schönberger, V., & Cukier, K. (2013). Big data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

[AI + Communication + Equity] Although celebratory in tone, this early popular text articulates the cross-pillar argument that bulk data analysis would reshape law, policy, and inequity at scale. The pillars synthesize in the chapter on datafication of human movement. A pre-2018 reference for the field. XD Nakamura, L. (2002). Cybertypes: Race, ethnicity, and identity on the Internet. Routledge.

[Equity + Communication] Nakamura's earlier work coins "cybertype" as the racialized stereotype that internet visual culture reproduces. The pillars synthesize in the menu of "racial" options on character-creation screens. XD Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.

[Equity + Communication] Spivak's question—Can the subaltern speak?—joins postcolonial theory and communication theory. The pillars synthesize in the figure of the woman whose suicide cannot be heard. Foundational. XP Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell. (Original work published in French)

Illuminates Communication/AI: Lefebvre's foundational text on spatial production is a cross-pollination with platform-architecture scholarship.

PHD-901 — PHD 901 · Emerging IP Issues: NFTs, Synthetic Media, AI Outputs

PHD pillar · PhD Year 3 · Fall 2030

Course MOC. Reading list compiled from the 5-year curriculum.

Essential books

  • ★ Jennifer Rothman — The Right of Publicity
  • ★ Joshua Fairfield — 'Tokenized'
  • ★ Citron & Chesney — 'Deep Fakes'
  • ★ Eric Goldman — Internet Law: Cases & Materials
  • ★ Lemley et al. — 'How Generative AI Turns Copyright Upside Down'

Supplementary books

  • ☆ Matthew Sag — 'Copyright Safety for Generative AI'
  • ☆ Henderson et al. — Foundation Models and Fair Use
  • ☆ Burk & Lemley — Fair Use and AI Training
  • ☆ Grimmelmann — 'Copyright for Literate Robots'
  • ☆ Anjali Vats — The Color of Creatorship

Papers (50)

1. *Citation: Joshua Fairfield, Tokenized: The Law of Non-Fungible Tokens and D. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Foundational doctrinal treatment of NFTs as novel legal objects Why Assigned:

2. *Citation: Andres Guadamuz, The Treachery of Images: Non-Fungible Tokens and. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Guadamuz interrogates whether purchasing an NFT conveys any IP rights in the underlying artwork Why Assigned:

3. *Citation: Carla L. Reyes, Conceptualizing Smart Contracts: Beyond the "If T. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Reyes challenges the reductive coding metaphor for smart contracts and develops a multi-layered typology—code l Why Assigned:

4. *Citation: Stefan Bechtold, The Art of Smart Contracts, 35 *Berkeley Techn. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Bechtold examines whether smart contracts can replicate—or should replace—standard IP licensing arrangements Why Assigned:

5. *Citation: Primavera De Filippi & Aaron Wright, Blockchain and the Law: The. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* The assigned chapter situates smart contracts within legal pluralism theory Why Assigned:

6. *Citation: Robert Allen, NFT Contracts and the Limits of Property: A Compara. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Allen surveys English Why Assigned:

7. *Citation: Danielle Keats Citron & Robert Chesney, Deep Fakes: A Looming Cha. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Required foundational paper Why Assigned:

8. *Citation: Jennifer E. Rothman, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined f. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Rothman reconstructs the right of publicity as a privacy interest rather than a property entitlement Why Assigned:

9. Ryan Calo, Robots as Legal Metaphors, 30 **Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. ** Robots as Legal Metaphors

10. *Citation: Paul Ohm & Stuart Harrington, Cognitive Decline, AI Voice Imperso. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Ohm and Harrington analyze AI-driven voice cloning as a distinct harm category Why Assigned:

11. *Citation: Mary Anne Franks, The Cult of the Constitution* (excerpt: "The De. ; condensed in 52 *Arizona State Law Journal* 1083 (2020) Abstract/Scope:

12. *Citation: Woodrow Hartzog & Evan Selinger, Facial Recognition Is the Perfec. ; expanded in 21 *Michigan Technology Law Review* 223 (2019) Abstract/Scope:

13. *Citation: Jane C. Ginsburg, People Not Machines: Authorship and What It Mea. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Ginsburg argues from textual Why Assigned:

14. Pamela Samuelson, Allocating Ownership Rights in Computer-Generated Works, 47. ** Allocating Ownership Rights in Computer-Generated Works

15. *Citation: Annemarie Bridy, Coding Creativity: Copyright and the Artificiall. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Bridy examines whether functional creativity—the capacity to produce outputs that would be deemed creative if p Why Assigned:

16. *Citation: Daniel J. Gervais, The Machine as Author, 105 Iowa Law Review. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Gervais surveys national-law approaches to machine authorship—U Why Assigned:

17. U.S. Copyright Office, *Copyright and Artificial Intelligence: Part 1 — Digital. ** Copyright and Artificial Intelligence: Part 1 — Digital Replicas

18. *Citation: Ryan Abbott, I Think, Therefore I Invent: Creative Computers and. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Abbott extends the AI-authorship debate into patent law Why Assigned:

19. *Citation: James Grimmelmann, There's No Such Thing as a Computer-Authored W. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Grimmelmann argues from a process-causation standpoint that all computer outputs are ultimately attributable to Literate Robots

20. *Citation: Mark A. Lemley & Bryan Casey, Fair Learning, 104 *Texas Law Rev. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Required text Why Assigned:

21. *Citation:* Peter Henderson, Xuechen Li, Dan Jurafsky, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Ma. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Required text Why Assigned:

22. Matthew Sag, Copyright Safety for Generative AI, 61 *Houston Law Review* 295. ** Copyright Safety for Generative AI

23. *Citation: Dan L. Burk & Mark A. Lemley, Fair Use and AI Training, *Stanfo. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Burk and Lemley update their decade-long collaboration on technology-specific IP policy to argue that the fair- Why Assigned:

24. *Citation: Tim W. Dornis, Artificial Intelligence and Innovation: The End of. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Dornis examines how large-scale automated prior-art generation by AI systems undermines the novelty and non-obv Why Assigned:

25. *Citation: Andres Guadamuz, Do Androids Dream of Electric Copyright? Compara. pp Abstract/Scope:

26. Matthew Sag, The New Legal Landscape for Text Mining and Machine Learning, 66. ** (8 papers)

27. Shyamkrishna Balganesh & Peter S. Menell, *The New York Times v. OpenAI and the. ** The New York Times v. OpenAI and the Future of AI Copyright Liability

28. *Citation: Matthew Sag & Jesse Lanier, Andersen v. Stability AI and the Visu. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Sag and Lanier survey the cluster of visual-art training cases (Andersen Why Assigned:

29. *Citation: Xiyin Tang, Thaler v. Perlmutter and the Future of AI Authorship. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Tang analyzes the D Why Assigned:

30. Andres Guadamuz, *Thaler v. Vidal: AI, Patents, and the Boundaries of Inventorsh. ** Thaler v. Vidal: AI, Patents, and the Boundaries of Inventorship

31. Tiffany Li & Mason Marks, *Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence and the Future o. ** Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence and the Future of Legal AI

32. Niva Elkin-Koren & Michal Shur-Ofry, *Kadrey v. Meta and the Limits of Consumpti. ** Kadrey v. Meta and the Limits of Consumptive Use

33. Madhavi Sunder & Paul Saint-Amour, *Bartz v. Anthropic and the Systemic-Harm The. ** Bartz v. Anthropic and the Systemic-Harm Theory of Copyright

34. *Citation: Matthew Sag, Authors Guild v. OpenAI: What the Lawsuit Gets Right. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Sag provides a balanced doctrinal assessment of the Authors Guild complaint Why Assigned:

35. *Citation: Eric Goldman & Rebecca Tushnet, The Law of Advertising, Endorseme. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Goldman and Tushnet examine how FTC endorsement guidelines Why Assigned:

36. *Citation: Rebecca Tushnet, Worth a Thousand Words: The Images of Copyright*. ; updated discussion of right-of-publicity proposals in 38 *Journal of Law and Technology* 55 (2023) Abstract/Scope:

37. *Citation: Jane Bambauer, Artificial Intelligence and the Right of Publicity. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Bambauer argues that AI-generated likenesses create a new sub-category of right-of-publicity harm that existing Why Assigned:

38. Stacey M. Lantagne, *The ELVIS Act and the Future of Voice Rights in the Streami. ** The ELVIS Act and the Future of Voice Rights in the Streaming Economy

39. *Citation: Robert Post, The Constitutional Status of Commercial Speech*, 48. applied to synthetic media in Derek Bambauer Orwell's Armchair

40. Danielle Keats Citron, Sexual Privacy, 128 *Yale Law Journal* 1870 (2019). ** (5 papers)

41. Rebecca Tushnet, Trademark Law as Commercial Speech Regulation, 58 **South Car. ** Trademark Law as Commercial Speech Regulation

42. Mark Bartholomew, *Adcreep: The Case for a Comprehensive Advertising Regulatory. ** Adcreep: The Case for a Comprehensive Advertising Regulatory Scheme

43. *Citation: Barton Beebe, The Semiotic Analysis of Trademark Law, 51 *UCLA. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Beebe applies Peircean semiotics to trademark doctrine Why Assigned:

44. *Citation: Jeanne C. Fromer, A Psychology of Intellectual Property, 104 *N. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Fromer applies behavioral-psychology insights to IP law Why Assigned:

45. Stacey Dogan & Mark Lemley, *The Trademark Use Requirement in Keyword Advertisin. ** (6 papers)

46. *Citation: Mark A. Lemley, Peter S. Menell & Robert P. Merges, How Generativ. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Required culminating text Why Assigned:

47. *Citation: Lev Manovich, AI Aesthetics, Moscow: Strelka Press* (2018), e. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Manovich analyzes AI-generated cultural artifacts through the lens of cultural analytics Why Assigned:

48. *Citation: Madhavi Sunder, IP3, 59 Stanford Law Review* 257 (2006). updated in Madhavi Sunder & Anupam Chander The Battle to Define the Internet's Immune System: Early Skirmishes

49. Eric Goldman, Internet Law: Cases and Materials (excerpt: Chapter 12, "Platfor. ** Internet Law: Cases and Materials

50. *Citation: Aniket Kesari, Christopher Tran & Tiffany Li, Algorithmic Account. (verify) *Abstract/Scope:* Kesari Why Assigned:

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Powers, R. (2021). Bewilderment. W. W. Norton.

[AI + Communication + Equity] An astrobiologist single-parents a neurodivergent boy through a brain-computer interface therapy trained on his deceased mother's brain scans. Powers binds AI (a feedback-trained neural therapy), communication (the father-son storytelling of imagined planets), and equity (a child medicated by school, a public-sector science under attack). The novel argues that machine intelligence, ecology, and the politics of neurodivergence cannot be separated. XD Okorafor, N. (2014). Lagoon. Hodder & Stoughton.

[Equity + Communication + AI] First contact comes to Lagos via the sea, and the aliens choose Nigeria as their landing point. Okorafor binds African internet folklore, postcolonial communication politics, and AI as embedded in nonhuman intelligence. The pillars synthesize in the choice of Lagos itself: a metropolis whose communications already exceed first-world expectations. XD Bardugo, L. (2023). Hell bent. Flatiron.

[Equity + Communication + IP] In the second Alex Stern volume, the secret societies of Yale appropriate magical IP from the global south to fuel their occult dealings. Bardugo binds elite communication networks, magical IP economies, and the equity politics of who is allowed to research the supernatural. The pillars meet in Alex's outsider status and the manuscripts she steals. XP Egan, J. (2022). The candy house. Scribner.

Illuminates AI/Communication: Egan's sequel-by-affinity to Goon Squad imagines a "Mandala" technology that lets users externalize and share their consciousness. Placed beside Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the novel illuminates the affective seductions of voluntary data extraction. A surprisingly intimate primer for surveillance studies.

Nonfiction

XD Veale, M., & Borgesius, F. Z. (2021). Demystifying the draft EU Artificial Intelligence Act. Computer Law Review International, 22(4). [Together with Veale's other work in the EU AI Act tradition.]

[AI + IP + Equity] Veale's work on the AI Act and on the legal infrastructure of high-risk AI systems sits at the cross-pillar intersection. The pillars synthesize in the regulatory question of which AI systems require which protections. XD McIlwain, C. D. (2019). Black software: The Internet and racial justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. Oxford University Press.

[Communication + Equity + AI] McIlwain traces a parallel history of Black-built computing networks from the 1980s through Black Lives Matter. The pillars synthesize in the figure of the Black coder as both communication actor and equity advocate. XD hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press.

[Equity + Communication] hooks's essays on the politics of representation—Madonna, Spike Lee, the "oppositional gaze"—lay the groundwork for cross-pillar media studies. The pillars synthesize in the "gaze" as both communication and equity concept. Canonical. XP de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published in French)

Illuminates Equity/Communication: de Certeau's distinction between strategies and tactics is the indispensable cross-pollination text for thinking about platform users as tactical practitioners.

PHD-902 — PHD 902 · Frontier AI: LLMs, Agents, and Multimodal Systems

PHD pillar · PhD Year 3 · Fall 2030

Course MOC. Reading list compiled from the 5-year curriculum.

Essential books

  • ★ Bommasani et al. — Foundation Models
  • ★ Brown et al. — 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners'
  • ★ Wei et al. — 'Chain-of-Thought Prompting'
  • ★ Bubeck et al. — 'Sparks of AGI'
  • ★ Bender et al. — 'Stochastic Parrots'

Supplementary books

  • ☆ Karen Hao — Empire of AI
  • ☆ Kate Crawford — Atlas of AI
  • ☆ Joy Buolamwini — Unmasking AI
  • ☆ Birhane et al. — 'Multimodal Datasets'
  • ☆ Wendy Chun — Discriminating Data

Papers (50)

1. Rishi Bommasani, Drew A. Hudson, Ehsan Adeli, et al. (Stanford CRFM, 200+ author. Bommasani et al. — "On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models

2. Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, et al. (OpenAI). Brown et al. — "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners" (GPT-3)

3. Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Tom Henighan, et al. (OpenAI). Kaplan et al. — "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models

4. Jordan Hoffmann, Sebastian Borgeaud, Arthur Mensch, et al. (DeepMind). Hoffmann et al. — "Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models" (Chinchilla)

5. Hugo Touvron, Thibaut Lavril, Gautier Izacard, et al. (Meta AI). Touvron et al. — "LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models

6. Jason Wei, Yi Tay, Rishi Bommasani, et al. (Google Brain / Stanford). Wei et al. — "Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models

7. Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, et al. (Google Brain / Google Researc. Vaswani et al. — "Attention Is All You Need

8. Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova (Google AI). Devlin et al. — "BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

9. Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, et al. (Google Brain). Raffel et al. — "Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer" (T5)

10. Alexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, et al. (Google Brain). Dosovitskiy et al. — "An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale" (ViT)

11. Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, Jian Sun (Microsoft Research). He et al. — "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition" (ResNet)

12. Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Jacob Devlin, et al. (Google). Chowdhery et al. — "PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways

13. Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, et al. (Google Brain). Wei et al. — "Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models

14. Shunyu Yao, Jeffrey Zhao, Dian Yu, et al. (Princeton / Google Brain). Yao et al. — "ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models

15. Timo Schick, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Roberto Dessì, et al. (Meta AI Research). Schick et al. — "Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools

16. Guanzhi Wang, Yuqi Xie, Yunfan Jiang, et al. (NVIDIA / Caltech). Wang et al. — "Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models

17. Joon Sung Park, Joseph C. O'Brien, Carrie J. Cai, et al. (Stanford). Park et al. — "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

18. Noah Shinn, Federico Cassano, Edward Berman, et al. (Northeastern University). Shinn et al. — "Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning

19. Paul Christiano, Jan Leike, Tom Brown, et al. (OpenAI). Christiano et al. — "Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences

20. Long Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, et al. (OpenAI). Ouyang et al. — "Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback" (InstructGPT)

21. Yuntao Bai, Saurav Kadavath, Sandipan Kundu, et al. (Anthropic). Bai et al. — "Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback" (Anthropic)

22. Stephen Casper, Xander Davies, Claudia Shi, et al. (MIT / various). Casper et al. — "Open Problems and Fundamental Limitations of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

23. Daniel M. Ziegler, Nisan Stiennon, Jeffrey Wu, et al. (OpenAI). Ziegler et al. — "Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences

24. Ethan Perez, Sam Ringer, Kamilė Lukošiūtė, et al. (Anthropic). Perez et al. — "Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations

25. Alec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, et al. (OpenAI). Radford et al. — "Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision" (CLIP)

26. Aditya Ramesh, Mikhail Pavlov, Gabriel Goh, et al. (OpenAI). Ramesh et al. — "Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation" (DALL-E)

27. Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley). Ho, Jain, and Abbeel — "Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models" (DDPM)

28. Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, et al. (LMU Munich / Runway). Rombach et al. — "High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models" (Stable Diffusion)

29. Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Jeff Donahue, Pauline Luc, et al. (DeepMind). Alayrac et al. — "Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning

30. OpenAI (collective authorship). OpenAI — "GPT-4 Technical Report

31. Ethan Perez, Saffron Huang, Francis Song, et al. (Anthropic / DeepMind). Perez et al. — "Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models

32. Deep Ganguli, Danny Hernandez, Liane Lovitt, et al. (Anthropic). Ganguli et al. — "Predictability and Surprise in Large Generative Models

33. Evan Hubinger, Carson Denison, Jesse Mu, et al. (Anthropic). Hubinger et al. — "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training" (Anthropic)

34. Samuel R. Bowman, Jeeyoon Hyun, Ethan Perez, et al. (NYU / Anthropic). Bowman et al. — "Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Models

35. Percy Liang, Rishi Bommasani, Tony Lee, et al. (Stanford CRFM). Liang et al. — "Holistic Evaluation of Language Models" (HELM)

36. Dan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, et al. (UC Berkeley / Center for AI. Hendrycks et al. — "Aligning AI With Shared Human Values

37. Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Shmargaret Shmitchell. Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, Shmitchell — "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?

38. Emily M. Bender, Alexander Koller. Bender and Koller — "Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data

39. Gary Marcus. Marcus — "Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal

40. Abeba Birhane, Pratyusha Kalluri, Dallas Card, et al.. Birhane, Kalluri, Card, Raji, Bhatt, Hanna — "The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research

41. Timnit Gebru, Jamie Morgenstern, Briana Vecchione, et al.. Gebru et al. — "Datasheets for Datasets

42. Sébastien Bubeck, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan, et al. (Microsoft Research). Bubeck et al. — "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4

43. Peter Henderson, Xuechen Li, Dan Jurafsky, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Mark A. Lemley,. Henderson, Krass, Yu, Hashimoto, Manning, Jurafsky, Ho — "Foundation Models and Fair Use

44. 99 Tex. L. Rev. 743 (2021). Lemley and Casey — "Fair Learning

45. Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram — "What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?

46. James Bridle. Bridle — "Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

47. Abeba Birhane, Vinay Uday Prabhu, Emmanuel Kahembwe. Birhane, Prabhu, and Kahembwe — "Multimodal Datasets: Misogyny, Pornography, and Malignant Stereotypes

48. Karen Hao (related investigations: MIT Technology Review "Empire of AI" series). Hao — "The Hidden Cost of AI: How Nvidia Became the Most Valuable Company in the World" (and related work)

49. Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, Sylvain Viguier, Anne-Laure Ligozat. Luccioni, Viguier, and Ligozat — "Estimating the Carbon Footprint of BLOOM, a 176B Parameter Language Model

50. Rishi Bommasani, Kevin Klyman, Shayne Longpre, et al. (Stanford CRFM). Bommasani, Klyman, Zhang, and Liang — "The Foundation Model Transparency Index

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Powers, R. (2025). Playground. W. W. Norton.

[AI + Equity + Communication] An AI billionaire revisits his Chicago boyhood friendship with a Black classmate while a small Polynesian island faces seasteading speculation by his company. Powers binds AI's voracious appetite for "feedback" to oceanic indigeneity, the speculative economics of platform colonization, and the IP regime of game design. The pillars meet on the island where AI-generated content threatens to overwrite a community's living memory. One of the most direct cross-pillar novels of the decade. XD Jemisin, N. K. (2015). The fifth season. Orbit.

[Equity + Communication + AI] In the Stillness, geomantic "orogenes" are enslaved to prevent civilization-ending earthquakes. Jemisin binds the inequity of biological caste with the communication apparatus of the Fulcrum training facility and the proto-AI of the obelisks. The pillars meet in the second-person address: the orogene narrator addressing herself across time. A canonical cross-pillar fantasy. XD North, C. (2019). The pursuit of William Abbey. Orbit.

[Equity + Communication + IP] A 19th-century English doctor in South Africa is cursed to be followed by the shadow of a murdered child; whenever the shadow catches him, the person he loves most dies. The British secret service weaponizes him as a "truth-speaker." North binds colonial inequity, communication-as-curse, and the IP of human intelligence. The pillars synthesize in the testimony itself. XP Tokarczuk, O. (2007). Flights (J. Croft, Trans.). Riverhead. (Original work published in Polish)

Illuminates Communication: Tokarczuk's novel-in-fragments of travelers, anatomists, and lost luggage is a meditation on the impossibility of arrival. Placed beside platform-studies work on streaming and the scroll, Flights illuminates a kind of writing that mirrors infinite-scroll attention while resisting its logic. A cross-pollination for thinking about the form of contemporary attention.

Nonfiction

XD Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Harvard University Press.

[AI + Communication + IP] Pasquale's earlier book establishes the "black box" as a metaphor and a legal problem: opaque algorithms in credit, search, and finance evade accountability through trade-secret IP. The pillars synthesize in the secrecy-property triangle. A canonical cross-pillar legal text. XD Rankine, P. D., & Brock, A., Jr. (Eds.). [As represented by Brock's Distributed Blackness and related anthologies on Black digital studies.]

[Communication + Equity + AI] Black digital studies as a field synthesizes communication, equity, and platform AI. Brock's anthology is a key entry point. XD hooks, b. (1981). Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism. South End Press.

[Equity + Communication] hooks's foundational text on Black feminist thought is also a critique of how Black women's testimony has been communicated, distorted, or erased. The pillars synthesize in the practice of theory-as-communication. XP Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. Yale University Press.

Illuminates Communication/Equity: Scott's account of hidden transcripts is a cross-pollination text for thinking about platform back-channels.