Category: Big Data

Why the pope has the ears of G7 leaders on the ethics of AI

Pope Francis is leaning on thinking of Paolo Benanti, a friar adept at explaining how technology can change world

The Guardian has some good analysis on Why the pope has the ears of G7 leaders on the ethics of AI | Artificial intelligence (AI). The PM of Italy, Meloni, invited the pope to address the G7 leaders on the issue of AI. I blogged about this here. It is worth pointing out that this is not the first time the Vatican has intervened on the issue of AI ethics. Here is a short timeline:

  • In 2020 a bunch of Catholic organizations and industry heavyweights sign the Rome Call (Call for AI Ethics). The Archbishop of Canterbury just signed.
  • In 2021 they create the RenAIssance Foundation building on the Rome Call. It’s scientific director is Paolo Benati, a charismatic Franciscan monk, professor, and writer on religion and technology. He is apparently advising both Meloni and the pope and he coined the term “algo-ethics”. Most of his publications are in Italian, but there is an interview in English. He is also apparently on the OECD’s expert panel now.
  • 2022 Benati publishes Human in the Loop: Decisioni umane e intelligenze artificiali (Human in the Loop: Human Decisions and Artificial Intelligences) which is about the importance of ethics to AI and the human in ethics.
  • 2024 Meloni invites the Pope to address the G7 leaders gathered in Italy on AI.

UN launches recommendations for urgent action to curb harm from spread of mis and disinformation and hate speech Global Principles for Information Integrity address risks posed by advances in AI

United Nations, New York, 24 June 2024 – The world must respond to the harm caused by the spread of online hate and lies while robustly upholding human rights, United Nations Secretary- General António Guterres said today at the launch of the United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity.

The UN has issued a press release announcing that the UN launches recommendations for urgent action to curb harm from spread of mis and disinformation and hate speech Global Principles for Information Integrity address risks posed by advances in AI. This press release marks the launch of the United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity.

The recommendations in the press release include:

Tech companies should ensure safety and privacy by design in all products, alongside consistent application of policies and resources across countries and languages, with particular attention to the needs of those groups often targeted online. They should elevate crisis response and take measures to support information integrity around elections.

Tech companies should scope business models that do not rely on programmatic advertising and do not prioritize engagement above human rights, privacy, and safety, allowing users greater choice and control over their online experience and personal data.

Advertisers should demand transparency in digital advertising processes from the tech sector to help ensure that ad budgets do not inadvertently fund disinformation or hate or undermine human rights.

Tech companies and AI developers should ensure meaningful transparency and allow researchers and academics access to data while respecting user privacy, commission publicly available independent audits and co-develop industry accountability frameworks.

 

Rebind | Read Like Never Before With Experts, AI, & Original Content

Experience the next chapter in reading with Rebind: the first AI-reading platform. Embark on expert-guided journeys through timeless classics.

From a NYTimes story I learned about John Kaag’s new initiative Rebind | Read Like Never Before With Experts, AI, & Original Content. The philosophers Kaag and Clancy Martin have teamed up with an investor to start a company that create AI enhanced “rebindings” of classics. They work with out of copyright book and then pay someone to interpret or comment on the book. The commentary is then used to train an AI with whom you can dialogue as you go through the book. The end result (which I am on the waitlist to try) will be a reading experience enhanced by interpretative videos and chances to interact. It answers Plato’s old critique of text that you can ask questions of it. Now you can.

This reminds me of an experiment by Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby who created a Daniel Dennett chatbot. Here you can see SChwitzgebel’s reflections on the project.

This project raised ethical issues like whether it was ethical to simulate a living person. In this case they asked for Dennett’s permission and didn’t give people direct access to the chatbot. With the announcements about Apple Intelligence it looks like Apple may provide an AI that is part of the system that will have access to your combined files so as to help with search and to help you talk with yourself. Internal dialogue, of course, is the paradigmatic manifestation of consciousness. Could one import one or two thinkers to have a multi-party dialogue about ones thinking over time … “What do you think Plato; should I write another paper about ethics and technology?”

Surgeon General: Social Media Platforms Need a Health Warning

It’s time for decisive action to protect our young people.

The New York Times is carrying an opinion piece by Vivek H. Murthy, the Surgeon General of the USA arguing that  Social Media Platforms Need a Health Warning. He argues that we have a youth mental health crisis and “social media has emerged as an important contributor.” For this reason he wants social media platforms to carry a warning label similar to cigarettes, something that would take congressional action.

He has more advice in a Social Media and Youth Mental Health advisory including protecting youth from harassment and problematic content. The rhetoric is to give parents support:

There is no seatbelt for parents to click, no helmet to snap in place, no assurance that trusted experts have investigated and ensured that these platforms are safe for our kids. There are just parents and their children, trying to figure it out on their own, pitted against some of the best product engineers and most well-resourced companies in the world.

Social media has gone from a tool of democracy (remember Tahir Square?) to a info-plague in a little over ten years. Just as it is easy to seek salvation in technology, and the platforms encourage such hype, it is also easy to blame it. The Surgeon General’s sort of advice will get broad support, but will anything happen? How long will it take regulation and civil society to box the platforms into civil business? The Surgeon General calls how well we protect our children a “moral test.” Indeed.

Media Monitoring of the Past · impresso

Leveraging an unprecedented corpus of newspaper and radio archives, **Impresso – Media Monitoring of the Past** is an interdisciplinary research project that uses machine learning to pursue a paradigm shift in the processing, semantic enrichment, representation, exploration, and study of historical media across modalities, time, languages, and national borders.

I just learned about the Swiss project  Impresso: Media Monitoring of the Past. This project has an impressive Web application that lets you search across 76 newspapers in two languages from two countries.

Key to the larger project is using machine learning to handle multiple modalities like:

  • News text and radio broadcasts
  • Text and Images
  • French and German
  • Different countries

A Data Lab that uses IPython is coming soon. They also have documentation about a Topic Modelling tool, but I couldn’t find the actual tool.

Anyway, this strikes me as an example of an advanced multi-modal news research environment.

 

Canadian AI 2024 Conference

I’m at the Canadian AI 2024 Conference where I will be on a panel about “The Future of Responsible AI and AI for Social Good in Canada” on Thursday. This panel is timely given that we seem to be seeing a sea-change in AI regulation. If initially there was a lot of talk about the dangers (to innovation) of regulation, we now have large players like China, the US and the EU introducing regulations.

  • President Biden has issued an “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” It is unlikely that Biden can get legislation through Congress so he is issuing executive orders.
  • The EU recently passed their AI Act which is risk-based.
  • The Canadian AI and Data Act (AIDA) is coming and is similarly risk-based.

In light of AIDA I would imagine that the short-term future for Responsible AI in Canada might include the following:

  • Debate about AIDA and amendments to align it with other jurisdictions and to respond to industry concerns. Will there be a more inclusive consultation?
  • Attempts to better define what are high-impact AIs so as to better anticipate what will need onerous documentation and assessment.
  • Elaboration of how to best run an impact assessment.
  • Discussions around responsibility and how to assign it in different situations.

I hope there will also be a critical exploration of the assumptions and limits of responsible AI.

The Deepfake Porn of Kids and Celebrities That Gets Millions of Views

It astonishes me that society apparently believes that women and girls should accept becoming the subject of demeaning imagery.

The New York Times has an opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof on deepfake porn,  The Deepfake Porn of Kids and Celebrities That Gets Millions of Views. The opinion says what is becoming obvious, that deepfake tools are being used overwhelmingly to create porn of women, whether celebrities, or girls people know. This artificial intelligence technology is not neutral, it is hurtful of a specific group – girls and women.

The article points to some research like a study 2023 State of Deepfakes by Home Security Heroes. Some of the key findings:

  • The number of deepfake videos is exploding (550% from 2019 to 2023)
  • 98% of the deepfake videos are porn
  • 99% of that porn women subjects
  • South Korean women singers and actresses are 53% of those targeted

It only takes about half an hour and almost no money to create a 60 second porn video from a single picture of someone. The ease of use and low cost is making these tools and services mainstream so that any yahoo can do it to his neighbour or schoolmate. It shouldn’t be surprising that we are seeing stories about young women being harassed by schoolmates that create and post deepfake porn. See stories here and here.

One might think this would be easy to stop – that the authorities could easily find and prosecute the creators of tools like ClothOff that lets you undress a girl whose photo you have taken. Alas, no. The companies hide behind false fronts. The Guardian has a podcast about trying to track down who owned or ran ClothOff.

What we don’t talk about is the responsibility of some research projects like LAION who have created open datasets for training text-to-image models that include pornographic images. They know their datasets include porn but speculate that this will help researchers.

You can learn more about deepfakes from AI Heelp!!!

The Lives of Literary Characters

The goal of this project is to generate knowledge about the behaviour of literary characters at large scale and make this data openly available to the public. Characters are the scaffolding of great storytelling. This Zooniverse project will allow us to crowdsource data to train AI models to better understand who characters are and what they do within diverse narrative worlds to answer one very big question: why do human beings tell stories?

Today we are going live on Zooinverse with our Citizen Science (crowdsourcing) project, The Lives of Literary Characters. The goal of the project is offer micro-tasks that allow volunteers to annotate literary passages that help annotate training data. It will be interesting to see if we get a decent number of volunteers.

Before setting this up we did some serious reading around the ethics of crowdsourcing as we didn’t want to just exploit readers.

 

OpenAI’s GPT store is already being flooded with AI girlfriend bots

OpenAI’s store rules are already being broken, illustrating that regulating GPTs could be hard to control

From Slashdot I learned about a stroy on how OpenAI’s GPT store is already being flooded with AI girlfriend bots. It isn’t particularly surprising that you can get different girlfriend bots. Nor is it surprising that these would be something you can build in ChatGPT-4. ChatGPT is, afterall, a chatbot. What will be interesting to see is whether these chatbot girlfriends are successful. I would have imagined that men would want pornographic girlfriends and that the market for friends would be more for boyfriends along the lines of what Replika offers.

Elon Musk, X and the Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust

Elon Musk thinks a free market of ideas will self-correct. Liberals want to regulate it. Both are missing a deeper predicament.

Jennifer Szalai of the New York Times has a good book review or essay on misinformation and disinformation, Elon Musk, X and the Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust. She writes about how Big Tech (Facebook and Google) benefit from the view that people are being manipulated by social media. It helps sell their services even though there is less evidence of clear and easy manipulation. It is possible that there is an academic business of Big Disinfo that is invested in a story about fake news and its solutions. The problem instead may be a problem of the authority of elites who regularly lie to the US public. This of the lies told after 9/11 to justify the “war on terror”; why should we believe any “elite”?

One answer is to call people to “Do your own research.” Of course that call has its own agenda. It tends to be a call for unsophisticated research through the internet. Of course, everyone should do their own research, but we can’t in most cases. What would it take to really understand vaccines through your own research, as opposed to joining some epistemic community and calling research the parroting of their truisms. With the internet there is an abundance of communities of research to join that will make you feel well-researched. Who needs a PhD? Who needs to actually do original research? Conspiracies like academic communities provide safe haven for networks of ideas.