Much scholarship considers how U.S. federal agencies govern artificial intelligence (AI) through rulemaking and their own internal use policies. But agencies have an overlooked AI governance role: setting discretionary grant policy when directing billions of dollars in federal financial assistance. These dollars enable state and local entities to study, create, and use AI. This funding not only goes to dedicated AI programs, but also to grantees using AI in the course of meeting their routine grant objectives. As discretionary grantmakers, agencies guide and restrict what grant winners do -- a hidden lever for AI governance. Agencies pull this lever by setting program objectives, judging criteria, and restrictions for AI use. Using a novel dataset of over 40,000 non-defense federal grant notices of funding opportunity (NOFOs) posted to the U.S. federal grants website between 2009 and 2024, we analyze how agencies regulate the use of AI by grantees. We select records mentioning AI and review their stated goals and requirements. We find agencies promoting AI in notice narratives, shaping adoption in ways other records of grant policy might fail to capture. Of the grant opportunities that mention AI, we find only a handful of AI-specific judging criteria or restrictions. This silence holds even when agencies fund AI uses in contexts affecting people's rights and which, under an analogous federal procurement regime, would result in extra oversight. These findings recast grant notices as a site of AI policymaking -- albeit one that is developing out of step with other regulatory efforts and incomplete in its consideration of transparency, accountability, and privacy protections. The paper concludes by drawing lessons from AI procurement scholarship, while identifying distinct challenges in grantmaking that invite further study.

He was surrounded by seven staff from the world's leading artificial intelligence lab, which had launched ChatGPT a few months earlier. One of them was Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder. For over a decade, Megill had been toiling in relative obscurity as the co-founder of Polis, a nonprofit open-source tech platform for carrying out public deliberations. Democracy, in Megill's view, had barely evolved in hundreds of years even as the world around it had transformed unrecognizably. Each voter has a multitude of beliefs they must distill down into a single signal: one vote, every few years. The heterogeneity of every individual gets lost and distorted, with the result that democratic systems often barely reflect the will of the people and tend toward polarization.

Although Big Tech is still (sometimes clumsily) figuring out generative AI's ethics and implications, the genie is out of the bottle, and the technology is already integrating into the workforce. From that perspective, Microsoft announced a new program today to train workers on AI. The initiative will offer free coursework through LinkedIn, including certification. It's somewhat ironic since the appeal of generative AI is that it's dead simple to use: It automates content creation using everyday language. But the courses could still provide tips for composing the most effective prompts while showing beginners the ropes, giving them a chance to keep pace with our rapidly changing world.

You can read this post on our blog. Now let's dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci! Consult our Events page to find your local time and how to join. Find out about more events. Maëlle Salmon (Research Software Engineer with rOpenSci) and Karthik Ram (rOpenSci executive director) authored a commentary "The R Developer Community Does Have a Strong Software Engineering Culture" in the latest issue of The R Journal edited by Di Cook, as a response to the discussion paper "Software Engineering and R Programming: A Call for Research" by Melina Vidoni (who's an Associate editor of rOpenSci Software Peer Review).

Sometimes, vocations and avocations need a champion, and students in Massachusetts looking to further their knowledge of science, technology and robotics have one in state Rep. Danillo Sena. A House member representing the 37th Middlesex District, Sena filed a bill on Feb. 4 titled "An Act establishing an elementary and secondary school robotics grant program," meant to create a grant program that provides public and charter schools the necessary funding to increase robotics and STEM participation during and after school. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, a branch of education designed to help students to become better problem-solvers. "Money should not be a barrier between students and access to fun and engaging STEM education programs that foster creativity and have lasting positive effects on student achievement like these robotics teams," the Acton Democrat stated in a release. The bill was created in collaboration with Olivia Oestreicher, a member of Team 4905 Andromeda One Robotics at Ayer Shirley Regional High School and a Rep. Sena intern.

In July 2015, Google's public-relations machine was in full-on crisis mode. Earlier that year, the search giant announced Photos, an AI-driven app that used machine-learning to automatically tag and organize your pictures based on the people, places and things depicted in them. It was an exciting step forward, but Photos wasn't perfect. While the app was capable of recognizing some faces, it mistook others. It would have been easy to pass this off as a routine software bug if it weren't for the nature of the failure.

It's not just the sci-fi community envisioning a world where machines take over. It's a concern among some prominent visionaries, including a group that just shelled out nearly $7 million for research into potential ill effects of artificial intelligence. The Future of Life Institute has awarded the money to 37 research teams that will be tasked with researching a range of topics related to the oncoming advancements of artificial intelligence, or AI, the organization announced on Wednesday. The funds come partly from the $10 million investment famed tech entrepreneur Elon Musk provided the group in January to determine the risks associated with AI. AI is a term used for the ability for a machine, computer, or system, to exhibit human-like intelligence.