Olivier Sylvain

"AI for People" is an indictment of how tech companies cloak ruthless commercial exploitation in the language of free speech. Olivier Sylvain, a leading legal scholar and former senior advisor at the Federal Trade Commission, exposes the incentives behind service designs, revealing how they trap users in cycles of addiction, misinformation, and harm—from fatal TikTok challenges to AI chatbot codependency. With clarity and urgency, Sylvain dismantles the libertarian mythology that shaped internet law and calls for a new ethics and legal regime that protects consumers over platforms or tech protocols.

"AI for People" is a powerful, original intervention into the most urgent policy debate of our time—what it will take to reclaim the digital public sphere. It also shows the way forward. Policymakers and educators should focus above all on developing AI systems across the economy, including in higher education, to advance human possibility. The opportunities in the technology are too great to surrender them to purely commercial applications.