Global crises clash

CRISIS

Eurovision Chaos

The annual Eurovision Song Contest is supposed to be non-political, but it never is. From countries voting for friends and neighbors (no country is allowed to vote for its own entry) to deliberately not voting for rivals, there have been politics at Eurovision for decades.

This is 2024. The EBU, which runs Eurovision, should have expected politics and should have prepared a crisis response strategy more generally. Not only did the winner, Ireland’s Bambie Thug, have makeup adorned with pro-Palestinian slogans, written in the Irish script Ogham, but in a separate incident one of the favored entries was disqualified.

This was the first disqualification so close to the finals. In 2021, the Belarussian entry was disqualified for lyrics which the EBU deemed political. This year the Netherlands entry by Joost Klein had been accepted as appropriate and Klein was one of the highly tipped contenders. But Klein was disqualified after a backstage incident led to a complaint to the police. The Malmo (Sweden) police had only just begun investigating the complaint when the EBU announced Klein’s disqualification with, seemingly, no clear thought given to the question of how the EBU had adjudicated who was at fault.

It seems as though the EBU was surprised by the controversies. But in the current geopolitical context, differences of opinion about the conflict in Gaza were inevitable. Suggestions of inappropriate behavior backstage is another scenario for which the EBU should have prepared and planned.

Reclaiming “safe spaces”

How can universities react to the challenges raised by protests? In particular, campuses have seen protests and counter-protests about the Gaza conflict.

Universities should generally be spaces in which the vigorous debating of ideas is encouraged. They should reclaim the concept of a “safe space” to mean a space where people can engage in passionate debate without fear of official sanction. It should not be a space where people are “safe” from encountering uncomfortable ideas. The unfamiliar, and even the uncomfortable, should be the currency of universities.

In the US, only state universities are governed by the First Amendment. It protects people from government action. Private institutions may have their own policies. But for a university to live up to its mission of seeking the truth, it will need to adopt a statement of principles very similar to the First.

There are legitimate grounds for curtailing gatherings and even speech. Reasonable restrictions as to time, place, and manner of expression are permissible. They should normally be content neutral, drawing no distinction between a political protest and a poetry reading. And even where rules are not content neutral, they should still be viewpoint neutral. If it is permissible to demonstrate in support of a particular cause it should be permissible to demonstrate against the same cause.

Narrow exceptions to the First include obscenity, true threats, incitement, and “fighting words”, though some commentators think the last of these is now effectively a dead letter.

This is not a legal blog. Legal Eagle and The Volokh Conspiracy, among many others, can give you better guidance on that. But universities which fail to follow, and consistently follow, a commitment to free speech will face an existential crisis. Even private universities, which are legally allowed to enforce strict speech codes, cannot expect to be taken seriously as institutions of learning if they do so. ??

ETHICS

Johannson vs OpenAI

Why does the voice of OpenAI’s chatbot sound like Scarlett Johansson?

In September last year, the company claimed that the voice was not meant to sound like her. But Johansson counters that the company asked for her cooperation in voicing the chatbot, but she declined. And CEO, Sam Altman, tweeted what seems to have been a reference to a movie in which Johansson provided the voice for an AI system.

OpenAI should have been sensitive to this issue. Hollywood saw disputes last year from both actors and writers about the use of AI. Johansson specifically has been the victim of AI-generated deep fakes in the past.

While there are legal grey areas in the use of AI to infringe, or potentially infringe, the image rights of celebrities, OpenAI should have seen this as a clear ethical issue, and one which had obvious potential to become a crisis. It is not as if the other party in this case does not have access to a platform. As one of the most famous actors in the world, she is not someone on whose bad side you want to get.