Civic tech in action: how 447 random citizens fixed an AI deepfake crisis | Audrey Tang

In 2024, Taiwan was flooded with deepfake scam ads. Instead of a crackdown, the government texted 200,000 random citizens: what should we do? People’s proposals became law within months, and by 2025 deepfake ads were down 94%.

In this episode, we speak with Audrey Tang, Taiwan's former digital minister. A self-taught programmer who dropped out at 14, she first helped occupy Taiwan's parliament during the 2014 Sunflower Movement, then joined the government two years later.

We cover:

• How Audrey went from organizing a 2014 parliamentary occupation to becoming Taiwan's digital minister two years later
• Her case for accelerating some AI capabilities and deliberately slowing others, and how she decides which is which
• How 447 randomly selected citizens drafted Taiwan's deepfake legislation
• Audrey’s proposal for AI systems that belong to local communities rather than sitting in a remote cloud
• Why she thinks being a "good enough ancestor" for future generations is more useful 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.

Chapters:

0:00 Cold open

0:48 How the Sunflower Movement led Audrey Tang into government

3:06 What is d/acc, and how does it work in practice?

5:39 How do you make democratic deliberation actually work?

6:49 Civic tech in action: Taiwan's deepfake scam crisis, and how citizens solved it

9:10 What a d/acc world could look like in 10 years

11:09 What frontier AI labs get right about public input

13:13 What AI labs are doing wrong on closing the public input loop

15:14 Can Taiwan's model work anywhere else?

18:10 Can one person cause catastrophic harm with AI?

22:02 Where Audrey Tang disagrees with the mainstream d/acc take

24:10 What Audrey Tang got wrong about transparency

26:36 What does it mean to be a "good enough ancestor"?

28:20 How to start your own civic AI project

30:25 The best advice Audrey Tang ever received

On the Existential Hope Podcast hosts Allison Duettmann and Beatrice Erkers from the Foresight Institute invite scientists, founders, and philosophers for in-depth conversations on positive, high-tech futures.

Full transcript, listed resources, and more: https://www.existentialhope.com/podcasts

Follow on X.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.