How much should academics engage with the public?

When should we descend from the Ivory Tower?

Academia is often referred to as the ivory tower, the metaphorical space where people who think for a living exist, not preoccupied with the goings on of the people living below them; its inhabitants live to pursue intellectual ruminations. It is not supposed to be a nice metaphor, and it is usually used in accusatory terms. Intellectuals are seen as elites, out of touch with the everyday folk, their studies often devoid of any practical application.

There are undoubtedly some people in academia who meet that stereotype, but in my experience they are few and far between. Modern academics are encouraged to be relevant, provide value for money, and prove “impact”, that most dreaded of words. Nowadays we’re supposed to engage the public where possible by giving public presentations, public engagement lectures and seminars, giving press interviews, and also participating in public decision-making exercises. All of this on top of admin, teaching, research, publishing, peer-review, etc. No wonder so many colleagues feel exhausted all the time, and the reports of academic burnout are real. Type “burnout in” into Google, and the first suggestion is academia.

Yet many of us keep trying to engage with the public in different ways. Some colleagues go to secondary schools to talk to aspiring lawyers. Some volunteer for open days. Some do podcasts. Some use Twitch. Some use TikTok. Some of us write blogs, and use Twitter. There may be those who would look down on this type of engagement as being beneath the goals of academia, we should talk only with other colleagues in the shape of specialised seminars and workshops. All of this trying to be funny online is an unwarranted distraction.

But sometimes we do need public-facing academics, the covid pandemic proved that we needed people willing to go on TV and talk to the public. However, something also became clear at that time, those very useful public academics became lightning rods to all sort of anti-vaxxers and nasty anti-lockdown trolls. Their every motive scrutinised, their every paper questioned, they were recipients of abuse and worse. And yet they prevailed. People like Prof Akiko Iwasaki, Prof Devi Sridhar, and Prof Trisha Greenlagh have been invaluable during the crisis.

I’ve been pondering about my own role as a public communicator during the last few months because, much to my surprise, my blog has been seeing an incredible influx of attention in two potentially controversial topics, NFTs and AI copyright. My blog usually gets a reasonable amount of traffic, but for a while audiences had been dwindling, mostly because I was writing fewer articles, but also because blogging could be considered a dying medium. And yet I still continued writing from time to time, the articles got longer, yet less frequent. For context, 2020 had been a pretty poor year by my standards, in part because I was too sick to write often, and my most visited post of the year had been precisely about my struggles with long covid. By February 2021, I was seriously considering if I should just shut down the blog, nobody was reading it. But I continued mostly because blogging is part of my research process: I tweet, I blog, then put everything together into a coherent article, post it on SSRN for comments, and then send it out for peer-review.

And then NFTs exploded into the scene, and everything changed. My NFT blog posts started making good numbers again, not only on the blog but on social media. There was a lot of public interest in one of my subjects, it’s like you’re a busker playing to himself, and a crowd suddenly shows up. It helped that I had already been writing about cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and blockchains for years. This continued all throughout 2021, and well into 2022. But by June of this year, interest in NFTs was dwindling, mostly because of the downturn in crypto prices, but also I think that people started waking up to just how silly NFTs are. I had already gotten out of it what I wanted, namely a peer-reviewed open access article, which became quite successful in its own right.

Then another subject that I’ve been writing about for a while completely exploded into the mainstream, AI art and copyright. DALL-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion have become big talking points, and people started asking questions about the copyright status of the images, and whether there is copyright infringement in the datasets. I wrote two blog posts about it (one on authorship, and one on infringement), they got a ton of attention, they’re by far the most visited articles to my blog in 5 years, yet this is where the story takes a dark turn.

I was completely unprepared for the level of interest, and animosity, that this subject is carrying. This is because in my writing I make two potentially controversial statements that many people do not want to hear. Firstly, some works made by AI carry copyright in some jurisdictions, particularly the UK. Secondly, in some jurisdictions training an AI with copyright works is not copyright infringement.

These brought me much more attention, but also more scrutiny that I was not prepared for. An interesting thing started happening, and it was that this scrutiny carried over to Twitter. I never argue with people on social media, it’s not my style. The few times I have gotten into arguments I tried to disengage immediately. But this time I started seeing more people not only disagreeing with me, but getting things very wrong. So for a little while I went into xkcd mode, and started answering back.

Big mistake.

There is a fine line between public engagement, and wasting your precious time arguing with people online. There is always someone who is going to be wrong, and it is not in your best interest to argue with Tom4568990134 and his 10 followers. The problem is that as an expert you can start a conversation in good faith, only to quickly find out that your interlocutor has an agenda, and is completely unprepared to even begin to argue with you. They often have gotten their ideas from Wikipedia pages, misread FAQs, industry myths, outdated case law, and a mishmash of jurisdictions that are included interchangeably. Legal analysis takes time because you have to know a lot of how the law works, how legislation interacts with treaties, that there’s a hierarchy of legal sources, how interpretation works, how to read case law, and how jurisdiction works. Once you start to realise that the person arguing with you lacks even the most basic understanding of the background, you’ve lost your time. Block and move on.

The problem I had is that I was still with my public communicator hat on, and increasingly getting frustrated with some of the arguments I was reading. I started getting upset, and to be honest reading back some threads I sound horrible. Arrogant. Angry. Impatient. Petulant. People who know me in person will probably laugh at this, I’m well known for being shy and reclusive in real life. So for a couple of days things got quite heated down at Twitter dot com, in big part due to a situation of my own making. I won’t go into details, the nastiness was over as soon as it begun, blink and you missed it.

But thankfully there are lessons to be learned, and this is why I am writing this blog post. I think that public engagement is important, particularly with some subjects that have a lot of public interest. What is happening with artificial intelligence has societal implications that we have not even started to comprehend. Copyright will be a small part of that, and I intend to continue exploring these issues. But now I have a bigger audience, people are paying attention, and some of those are not friendly. So personally I will have to be much more careful in how and when I engage. There are still some angry people out there, and I have learned how to judiciously use the block button on Twitter. Interestingly, the trolls haven’t come to the blog, I haven’t had to filter out a single comment. That probably says more about the divisive nature of Twitter than anything else, but I digress.

Personally I am starting to come up with a set of rules on how to engage the public judiciously, particularly in difficult subjects. I have set out a few for myself here, feel free to add more in the comments if you have suggestions:

• There’s always someone wrong on the Internet. You don’t need to correct every person making a wrong comment about your subject. Trying to explain a rich and complex area in a few tweets will always fail.
• Only a Sith deals in absolutes. It’s amazing how many people miss all of the caveats in my writing. I always use conditionals: may, might, could, it’s possible, I think, I believe, I could be wrong, other experts have a different opinion. People seem to think that if you argue something in one post, it’s forever your opinion. We change. We get things wrong. A case may come along and destroy all your arguments.
• Jurisdiction is important. Always make sure that you state which jurisdiction your opinion applies to, and the level of confidence you have when talking about other jurisdictions. The public does not understand that there is no such thing as an International Magic Internet Law, or that US Law doesn’t apply everywhere. Some important matters of law could apply just to one country.
• Don’t feed the trolls. I’ve always known this, but sometimes the temptation is too great, but it never ends well. You come across as defensive, arrogant, whiny, or a combination of those. Do not engage with trolls. As the quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw says, “I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.“
• More attention, more scrutiny. I was not prepared for this. Some people started scouring my timeline for things to bring up during arguments, ad hominem is a logical fallacy for a reason. Thankfully I have a well-curated online presence, but I was surprised that some nasty people would take even the most innocent comment and twist it. There’s nothing to do about this, you either respond to the falsehoods (which breaks the “don’t feed the trolls” rule), or you move on.

I have always enjoyed the public engagement aspect of academia, and I do it even if there are 10 people reading, or 10,000. But these last few weeks have been an eye-opener. I need to be more careful with my words, more careful with who I use them with, but most importantly, more careful with my own well-being. I think that academics do have a responsibility to be public-facing, but not at the risk of losing sight of your own health and safety.

As Elsa wisely sang, let it go.