Category: Big Data

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.

How AI Image Generators Make Bias Worse – YouTube

A team at the LIS (London Interdisciplinary School) have created a great short video on the biases of AI image generators. The video covers the issues quickly and is documented with references you can follow for more. I had been looking at how image generators portrayed academics like philosophers, but this reports on research that went much further.

What is also interesting is how this grew out of a LIS undergrad’s first year project. It says something about LIS that they encourage and build on such projects. This got me wondering about the LIS which I had never heard of before. It seems to be a new teaching college in London, UK that is built around interdisciplinary programmes, not departments, that deal with “real-world problems.” It sounds a bit like problem-based learning.

Anyway, it will be interesting to watch how it evolves.

CEO Reminds Everyone His Company Collects Customers’ Sleep Data to Make Zeitgeisty Point About OpenAI Drama

The Eight Sleep pod is a mattress topper with a terms of service and a privacy policy. The company “may share or sell” the sleep data it collects from its users.

From SlashDot a story about how a CEO Reminds Everyone His Company Collects Customers’ Sleep Data to Make Zeitgeisty Point About OpenAI Drama. The story is worrisome because of the data being gathered by a smart mattress company and the use it is being put to. I’m less sure of the CEO’s (Matteo Franceschetti) inferences from his data and his call to “fix this.” How would Eight Sleep fix this? Sell more product?

The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023

Today and tomorrow representatives from a number of countries have gathered at Bletchley Park to discuss AI safety. Close to 30 countries, including Canada were represented and they issued The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023. This declaration starts with,

Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents enormous global opportunities: it has the potential to transform and enhance human wellbeing, peace and prosperity. To realise this, we affirm that, for the good of all, AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in a manner that is safe, in such a way as to be human-centric, trustworthy and responsible.

The declaration discusses opportunities and the need to support innovation, but also mentions that “AI also poses significant risks” and mentions the usual suspects, especially “capable, general-purpose models” that could be repurposed for misuse.

What stands out is the commitment to international collaboration among the major players, including China. This is a good sign.

Many risks arising from AI are inherently international in nature, and so are best addressed through international cooperation. We resolve to work together in an inclusive manner to ensure human-centric, trustworthy and responsible AI that is safe, and supports the good of all through existing international fora and other relevant initiatives, to promote cooperation to address the broad range of risks posed by AI.

Bletchley Park is becoming a UK symbol of computing. It was, of course, where the Allied code-breaking centre was set up. It is where Turing worked on the Colossus, an important early computer used to decode the German ciphers and give the Allies a crucial advantage. It is appropriate that UK Prime Minister Sunak has used this site to gather representatives. Unfortunately few leaders joined him there, sending representatives instead, though Trudeau may show up on the 2nd.

Alas, the Declaration is short on specifics though individual countries like the United States and Canada are securing voluntary commitments from players to abide by codes of conduct. China and the EU are also passing laws regulating artificial intelligence.

One thing not mentioned at all are the dangers of military uses of AI. It is as if warbots are off the table in AI safety discussions.

The good news is that there will be follow up meetings at which we can hope that concrete agreements might be worked out.