Law
The AI Act proposal: a new right to technical interpretability?
The debate about the concept of the so called right to explanation in AI is the subject of a wealth of literature. It has focused, in the legal scholarship, on art. 22 GDPR and, in the technical scholarship, on techniques that help explain the output of a certain model (XAI). The purpose of this work is to investigate if the new provisions introduced by the proposal for a Regulation laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (AI Act), in combination with Convention 108 plus and GDPR, are enough to indicate the existence of a right to technical explainability in the EU legal framework and, if not, whether the EU should include it in its current legislation. This is a preliminary work submitted to the online event organised by the Information Society Law Center and it will be later developed into a full paper.
How GPT-3 responds to different publics on climate change and Black Lives Matter: A critical appraisal of equity in conversational AI
Chen, Kaiping, Shao, Anqi, Burapacheep, Jirayu, Li, Yixuan
Autoregressive language models, which use deep learning to produce human-like texts, have become increasingly widespread. Such models are powering popular virtual assistants in areas like smart health, finance, and autonomous driving. While the parameters of these large language models are improving, concerns persist that these models might not work equally for all subgroups in society. Despite growing discussions of AI fairness across disciplines, there lacks systemic metrics to assess what equity means in dialogue systems and how to engage different populations in the assessment loop. Grounded in theories of deliberative democracy and science and technology studies, this paper proposes an analytical framework for unpacking the meaning of equity in human-AI dialogues. Using this framework, we conducted an auditing study to examine how GPT-3 responded to different sub-populations on crucial science and social topics: climate change and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Our corpus consists of over 20,000 rounds of dialogues between GPT-3 and 3290 individuals who vary in gender, race and ethnicity, education level, English as a first language, and opinions toward the issues. We found a substantively worse user experience with GPT-3 among the opinion and the education minority subpopulations; however, these two groups achieved the largest knowledge gain, changing attitudes toward supporting BLM and climate change efforts after the chat. We traced these user experience divides to conversational differences and found that GPT-3 used more negative expressions when it responded to the education and opinion minority groups, compared to its responses to the majority groups. We discuss the implications of our findings for a deliberative conversational AI system that centralizes diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The Equitable AI Research Roundtable (EARR): Towards Community-Based Decision Making in Responsible AI Development
Smith-Loud, Jamila, Smart, Andrew, Neal, Darlene, Ebinama, Amber, Corbett, Eric, Nicholas, Paul, Rashid, Qazi, Peckham, Anne, Murphy-Gray, Sarah, Morris, Nicole, Arrillaga, Elisha Smith, Cotton, Nicole-Marie, Almedom, Emnet, Araiza, Olivia, McCullough, Eliza, Langston, Abbie, Nellum, Christopher
This paper reports on our initial evaluation of The Equitable AI Research Roundtable -- a coalition of experts in law, education, community engagement, social justice, and technology. EARR was created in collaboration among a large tech firm, nonprofits, NGO research institutions, and universities to provide critical research based perspectives and feedback on technology's emergent ethical and social harms. Through semi-structured workshops and discussions within the large tech firm, EARR has provided critical perspectives and feedback on how to conceptualize equity and vulnerability as they relate to AI technology. We outline three principles in practice of how EARR has operated thus far that are especially relevant to the concerns of the FAccT community: how EARR expands the scope of expertise in AI development, how it fosters opportunities for epistemic curiosity and responsibility, and that it creates a space for mutual learning. This paper serves as both an analysis and translation of lessons learned through this engagement approach, and the possibilities for future research.
The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) – Companion document
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are poised to have a significant impact on the lives of Canadians and the operations of Canadian businesses. The AIDA represents an important milestone in implementing the Digital Charter and ensuring that Canadians can trust the digital technologies that they use every day. The design, development, and use of AI systems must be safe, and must respect the values of Canadians. The framework proposed in the AIDA is the first step towards a new regulatory system designed to guide AI innovation in a positive direction, and to encourage the responsible adoption of AI technologies by Canadians and Canadian businesses. The Government intends to build on this framework through an open and transparent regulatory development process. Consultations would be organized to gather input from a variety of stakeholders across Canada to ensure that the regulations achieve outcomes aligned with Canadian values. The global interconnectedness of the digital economy requires that the regulation of AI systems in the marketplace be coordinated internationally. Canada has drawn from and will work together with international partners – such as the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom, and the United States (US) – to align approaches, in order to ensure that Canadians are protected globally and that Canadian firms can be recognized internationally as meeting robust standards.
AI Apocalypse: What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Goes Rogue? - cyberpogo
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming an integral part of modern society, from chatbots like ChatGPT to self-driving cars that navigate our roads. With its ability to analyze vast amounts of data and make decisions based on that information, AI has the potential to revolutionize nearly every industry and transform our world in extraordinary ways. However, there is a growing concern about what happens when these intelligent machines malfunction or become malicious. It is essential to keep in mind the risks of AI becoming a menace and take proactive steps to ensure it remains a helpmate and a force for good. This article aims to examine the potential consequences of AI going rogue and explore how we can prevent such an outcome.
Why Are We Letting the AI Crisis Just Happen?
New AI systems such as ChatGPT, the overhauled Microsoft Bing search engine, and the reportedly soon-to-arrive GPT-4 have utterly captured the public imagination. ChatGPT is the fastest-growing online application, ever, and it's no wonder why. Type in some text, and instead of getting back web links, you get well-formed, conversational responses on whatever topic you selected--an undeniably seductive vision. But the public, and the tech giants, aren't the only ones who have become enthralled with the Big Data–driven technology known as the large language model. Bad actors have taken note of the technology as well. At the extreme end, there's Andrew Torba, the CEO of the far-right social network Gab, who said recently that his company is actively developing AI tools to "uphold a Christian worldview" and fight "the censorship tools of the Regime."
Facial-recognition: How Sports Direct and Spar are using Chinese-made cameras to spot shoplifters
Sports Direct, Spar, Budgens, Costcutter and Southern Co-op are now among the growing number of British retailers using a controversial Chinese state-owned facial-recognition system. The biometric cameras work by scanning the faces of shoppers so they can be checked against a database of suspected criminals. But they have been branded'Orwellian' and'unlawful' by critics, who claim that staff could add people to a secret'blacklist' without them knowing. So how does the facial-recognition system work, and which shops are already using it? Here, MailOnline breaks down everything you need to know about the controversial technology.
In the News: Jaishankar on 'ChatGPT' -- ORF America
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PDEBENCH: An Extensive Benchmark for Scientific Machine Learning
Takamoto, Makoto, Praditia, Timothy, Leiteritz, Raphael, MacKinlay, Dan, Alesiani, Francesco, Pflüger, Dirk, Niepert, Mathias
Machine learning-based modeling of physical systems has experienced increased interest in recent years. Despite some impressive progress, there is still a lack of benchmarks for Scientific ML that are easy to use but still challenging and representative of a wide range of problems. We introduce PDEBench, a benchmark suite of time-dependent simulation tasks based on Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). PDEBench comprises both code and data to benchmark the performance of novel machine learning models against both classical numerical simulations and machine learning baselines. Our proposed set of benchmark problems contribute the following unique features: (1) A much wider range of PDEs compared to existing benchmarks, ranging from relatively common examples to more realistic and difficult problems; (2) much larger ready-to-use datasets compared to prior work, comprising multiple simulation runs across a larger number of initial and boundary conditions and PDE parameters; (3) more extensible source codes with user-friendly APIs for data generation and baseline results with popular machine learning models (FNO, U-Net, PINN, Gradient-Based Inverse Method). PDEBench allows researchers to extend the benchmark freely for their own purposes using a standardized API and to compare the performance of new models to existing baseline methods. We also propose new evaluation metrics with the aim to provide a more holistic understanding of learning methods in the context of Scientific ML. With those metrics we identify tasks which are challenging for recent ML methods and propose these tasks as future challenges for the community. The code is available at https://github.com/pdebench/PDEBench.
Redrawing attendance boundaries to promote racial and ethnic diversity in elementary schools
Gillani, Nabeel, Beeferman, Doug, Vega-Pourheydarian, Christine, Overney, Cassandra, Van Hentenryck, Pascal, Roy, Deb
Most US school districts draw "attendance boundaries" to define catchment areas that assign students to schools near their homes, often recapitulating neighborhood demographic segregation in schools. Focusing on elementary schools, we ask: how much might we reduce school segregation by redrawing attendance boundaries? Combining parent preference data with methods from combinatorial optimization, we simulate alternative boundaries for 98 US school districts serving over 3 million elementary-aged students, minimizing White/non-White segregation while mitigating changes to travel times and school sizes. Across districts, we observe a median 14% relative decrease in segregation, which we estimate would require approximately 20\% of students to switch schools and, surprisingly, a slight reduction in travel times. We release a public dashboard depicting these alternative boundaries (https://www.schooldiversity.org/) and invite both school boards and their constituents to evaluate their viability. Our results show the possibility of greater integration without significant disruptions for families.