The new text and data analysis service from JSTOR and Portico.
Thanks to John I have been exploring Constellate. This comes from ITHAKA that has developed JSTOR. Constellate lets you build a dataset from their collections and then visualize the data (see image above.) They also have a Jupyter lab where you can then run notebooks on your data.
They are now experimenting with AI tools.
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:
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.
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?”
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.
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:
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.
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.
In light of AIDA I would imagine that the short-term future for Responsible AI in Canada might include the following:
I hope there will also be a critical exploration of the assumptions and limits of responsible AI.
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:
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 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 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.
