Law
On the rise of fear speech in online social media
Saha, Punyajoy, Garimella, Kiran, Kalyan, Narla Komal, Pandey, Saurabh Kumar, Meher, Pauras Mangesh, Mathew, Binny, Mukherjee, Animesh
Recently, social media platforms are heavily moderated to prevent the spread of online hate speech, which is usually fertile in toxic words and is directed toward an individual or a community. Owing to such heavy moderation, newer and more subtle techniques are being deployed. One of the most striking among these is fear speech. Fear speech, as the name suggests, attempts to incite fear about a target community. Although subtle, it might be highly effective, often pushing communities toward a physical conflict. Therefore, understanding their prevalence in social media is of paramount importance. This article presents a large-scale study to understand the prevalence of 400K fear speech and over 700K hate speech posts collected from Gab.com. Remarkably, users posting a large number of fear speech accrue more followers and occupy more central positions in social networks than users posting a large number of hate speech. They can also reach out to benign users more effectively than hate speech users through replies, reposts, and mentions. This connects to the fact that, unlike hate speech, fear speech has almost zero toxic content, making it look plausible. Moreover, while fear speech topics mostly portray a community as a perpetrator using a (fake) chain of argumentation, hate speech topics hurl direct multitarget insults, thus pointing to why general users could be more gullible to fear speech. Our findings transcend even to other platforms (Twitter and Facebook) and thus necessitate using sophisticated moderation policies and mass awareness to combat fear speech.
Robust probabilistic inference via a constrained transport metric
Chakraborty, Abhisek, Bhattacharya, Anirban, Pati, Debdeep
Flexible Bayesian models are typically constructed using limits of large parametric models with a multitude of parameters that are often uninterpretable. In this article, we offer a novel alternative by constructing an exponentially tilted empirical likelihood carefully designed to concentrate near a parametric family of distributions of choice with respect to a novel variant of the Wasserstein metric, which is then combined with a prior distribution on model parameters to obtain a robustified posterior. The proposed approach finds applications in a wide variety of robust inference problems, where we intend to perform inference on the parameters associated with the centering distribution in presence of outliers. Our proposed transport metric enjoys great computational simplicity, exploiting the Sinkhorn regularization for discrete optimal transport problems, and being inherently parallelizable. We demonstrate superior performance of our methodology when compared against state-of-the-art robust Bayesian inference methods. We also demonstrate equivalence of our approach with a nonparametric Bayesian formulation under a suitable asymptotic framework, testifying to its flexibility. The constrained entropy maximization that sits at the heart of our likelihood formulation finds its utility beyond robust Bayesian inference; an illustration is provided in a trustworthy machine learning application.
LSwinSR: UAV Imagery Super-Resolution based on Linear Swin Transformer
Super-resolution, which aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution images, has drawn considerable attention and has been intensively studied in computer vision and remote sensing communities. The super-resolution technology is especially beneficial for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), as the amount and resolution of images captured by UAV are highly limited by physical constraints such as flight altitude and load capacity. In the wake of the successful application of deep learning methods in the super-resolution task, in recent years, a series of super-resolution algorithms have been developed. In this paper, for the super-resolution of UAV images, a novel network based on the state-of-the-art Swin Transformer is proposed with better efficiency and competitive accuracy. Meanwhile, as one of the essential applications of the UAV is land cover and land use monitoring, simple image quality assessments such as the Peak-Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) are not enough to comprehensively measure the performance of an algorithm. Therefore, we further investigate the effectiveness of super-resolution methods using the accuracy of semantic segmentation. The code will be available at https://github.com/lironui/LSwinSR.
What Have Humans Just Unleashed?
GPT-4 is here, and you've probably heard a good bit about it already. It can turn a hand-sketched design into a functional website and help with your taxes. It got a 5 on the AP Art History test. There were already fears about AI coming for white-collar work, disrupting education, and so much else, and there was some healthy skepticism about those fears. So where does a more powerful AI leave us?
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Investigation underway after AI tool may have misinterpreted a child's disability as parental neglect
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. For the two weeks that the Hackneys' baby girl lay in a Pittsburgh hospital bed weak from dehydration, her parents rarely left her side, sometimes sleeping on the fold-out sofa in the room. They stayed with their daughter around the clock when she was moved to a rehab center to regain her strength. Finally, the 8-month-old stopped batting away her bottles and started putting on weight again. "She was doing well and we started to ask when can she go home," Lauren Hackney said.
PwC's 4,000 legal staffers get AI assistant as law chatbots gain steam
PwC said it partnered with AI startup Harvey for an initial 12-month contract, which the accounting and consulting firm said will help lawyers with contract analysis, regulatory compliance work, due diligence and other legal advisory and consulting services. PwC said it will also determine ways for tax professionals to use the technology. It said its access to Harvey's technology is exclusive among the Big Four professional services firms. Harvey is built on technology from OpenAI, the Microsoft Corp-backed startup that on Tuesday released an upgraded version of its AI sensation ChatGPT. Harvey received a $5 million investment last year in a funding round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Towards the Scalable Evaluation of Cooperativeness in Language Models
Chan, Alan, Riché, Maxime, Clifton, Jesse
It is likely that AI systems driven by pre-trained language models (PLMs) will increasingly be used to assist humans in high-stakes interactions with other agents, such as negotiation or conflict resolution. Consistent with the goals of Cooperative AI \citep{dafoe_open_2020}, we wish to understand and shape the multi-agent behaviors of PLMs in a pro-social manner. An important first step is the evaluation of model behaviour across diverse cooperation problems. Since desired behaviour in an interaction depends upon precise game-theoretic structure, we focus on generating scenarios with particular structures with both crowdworkers and a language model. Our work proceeds as follows. First, we discuss key methodological issues in the generation of scenarios corresponding to particular game-theoretic structures. Second, we employ both crowdworkers and a language model to generate such scenarios. We find that the quality of generations tends to be mediocre in both cases. We additionally get both crowdworkers and a language model to judge whether given scenarios align with their intended game-theoretic structure, finding mixed results depending on the game. Third, we provide a dataset of scenario based on our data generated. We provide both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of UnifiedQA and GPT-3 on this dataset. We find that instruct-tuned models tend to act in a way that could be perceived as cooperative when scaled up, while other models seemed to have flat scaling trends.