Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, we talk to Daniel Leufer and Caterina Rodelli from Access Now, a global advocacy organization that focuses on the impact of the digital on human rights. As leaders in this field, they've been working hard to ensure that the European Union's AI Act doesn't undermine human rights or indeed fundamental democratic values. They share with us how the EU AI act was put together, the Act's particular downfalls, and where the opportunities are for us as citizens or as digital rights activists to get involved and make sure that it's upheld by companies across the world. Note: this episode was recorded back in February 2024.

Social media is being flooded by digitally created "deepfake" videos using the trusted identities of famous doctors to promote dangerous miracle cures for serious health problems, experts warn. Videos on Facebook and Instagram have taken advantage of the credibility of star TV doctors to advertise untested "natural" syrups for diabetes, even claiming that the proven, first-line drug metformin "could kill" patients. These scams risk endangering lives, experts said, particularly because they deploy the likenesses of popular health experts such as British TV presenter Michael Mosley, who died earlier this year.

WiFi sensing is an emerging technology that utilizes wireless signals for various sensing applications. However, the reliance on supervised learning, the scarcity of labelled data, and the incomprehensible channel state information (CSI) pose significant challenges. These issues affect deep learning models' performance and generalization across different environments. Consequently, self-supervised learning (SSL) is emerging as a promising strategy to extract meaningful data representations with minimal reliance on labelled samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel SSL framework called Context-Aware Predictive Coding (CAPC), which effectively learns from unlabelled data and adapts to diverse environments. CAPC integrates elements of Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) and the augmentation-based SSL method, Barlow Twins, promoting temporal and contextual consistency in data representations. This hybrid approach captures essential temporal information in CSI, crucial for tasks like human activity recognition (HAR), and ensures robustness against data distortions. Additionally, we propose a unique augmentation, employing both uplink and downlink CSI to isolate free space propagation effects and minimize the impact of electronic distortions of the transceiver. Our evaluations demonstrate that CAPC not only outperforms other SSL methods and supervised approaches, but also achieves superior generalization capabilities. Specifically, CAPC requires fewer labelled samples while significantly outperforming supervised learning and surpassing SSL baselines. Furthermore, our transfer learning studies on an unseen dataset with a different HAR task and environment showcase an accuracy improvement of 1.8 percent over other SSL baselines and 24.7 percent over supervised learning, emphasizing its exceptional cross-domain adaptability.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize various sectors, yet its adoption is often hindered by concerns about data privacy, security, and the understanding of AI capabilities. This paper synthesizes AI governance approaches, strategic themes, and enablers and challenges for AI adoption by reviewing national AI strategies from leading nations. The key contribution is the development of an EPIC (Education, Partnership, Infrastructure, Community) framework, which maps AI implementation requirements to fully realize social impacts and public good from successful and sustained AI deployment. Through a multi-perspective content analysis of the latest AI strategy documents, this paper provides a structured comparison of AI governance strategies across nations. The findings offer valuable insights for governments, academics, industries, and communities to enable responsible and trustworthy AI deployments. Future work should focus on incorporating specific requirements for developing countries and applying the strategies to specific AI applications, industries, and the public sector.

In a parallel with the 20 questions game, we present a method to determine whether two large language models (LLMs), placed in a black-box context, are the same or not. The goal is to use a small set of (benign) binary questions, typically under 20. We formalize the problem and first establish a baseline using a random selection of questions from known benchmark datasets, achieving an accuracy of nearly 100% within 20 questions. After showing optimal bounds for this problem, we introduce two effective questioning heuristics able to discriminate 22 LLMs by using half as many questions for the same task. These methods offer significant advantages in terms of stealth and are thus of interest to auditors or copyright owners facing suspicions of model leaks.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has quickly grown into a pivotal paradigm in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). While much of the current research in this field focuses on performance optimization, particularly in terms of accuracy and efficiency, the trustworthiness of RAG systems remains an area still under exploration. From a positive perspective, RAG systems are promising to enhance LLMs by providing them with useful and up-to-date knowledge from vast external databases, thereby mitigating the long-standing problem of hallucination. While from a negative perspective, RAG systems are at the risk of generating undesirable contents if the retrieved information is either inappropriate or poorly utilized. To address these concerns, we propose a unified framework that assesses the trustworthiness of RAG systems across six key dimensions: factuality, robustness, fairness, transparency, accountability, and privacy. Within this framework, we thoroughly review the existing literature on each dimension. Additionally, we create the evaluation benchmark regarding the six dimensions and conduct comprehensive evaluations for a variety of proprietary and open-source models. Finally, we identify the potential challenges for future research based on our investigation results. Through this work, we aim to lay a structured foundation for future investigations and provide practical insights for enhancing the trustworthiness of RAG systems in real-world applications.

The recent explosion of generative AI-Music systems has raised numerous concerns over data copyright, licensing music from musicians, and the conflict between open-source AI and large prestige companies. Such issues highlight the need for publicly available, copyright-free musical data, in which there is a large shortage, particularly for symbolic music data. To alleviate this issue, we present PDMX: a large-scale open-source dataset of over 250K public domain MusicXML scores collected from the score-sharing forum MuseScore, making it the largest available copyright-free symbolic music dataset to our knowledge. PDMX additionally includes a wealth of both tag and user interaction metadata, allowing us to efficiently analyze the dataset and filter for high quality user-generated scores. Given the additional metadata afforded by our data collection process, we conduct multitrack music generation experiments evaluating how different representative subsets of PDMX lead to different behaviors in downstream models, and how user-rating statistics can be used as an effective measure of data quality. Examples can be found at https://pnlong.github.io/PDMX.demo/.

AI fairness measurements, including tests for equal treatment, often take the form of disaggregated evaluations of AI systems. Such measurements are an important part of Responsible AI operations. These measurements compare system performance across demographic groups or sub-populations and typically require member-level demographic signals such as gender, race, ethnicity, and location. However, sensitive member-level demographic attributes like race and ethnicity can be challenging to obtain and use due to platform choices, legal constraints, and cultural norms. In this paper, we focus on the task of enabling AI fairness measurements on race/ethnicity for \emph{U.S. LinkedIn members} in a privacy-preserving manner. We present the Privacy-Preserving Probabilistic Race/Ethnicity Estimation (PPRE) method for performing this task. PPRE combines the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) model, a sparse LinkedIn survey sample of self-reported demographics, and privacy-enhancing technologies like secure two-party computation and differential privacy to enable meaningful fairness measurements while preserving member privacy. We provide details of the PPRE method and its privacy guarantees. We then illustrate sample measurement operations. We conclude with a review of open research and engineering challenges for expanding our privacy-preserving fairness measurement capabilities.

Debiasing is often challenging due to computational costs, data constraints, and potential degradation of multi-task language capabilities. This work introduces a novel approach utilizing ChatGPT to generate synthetic training data, aiming to enhance the debiasing of LLMs. We propose two strategies: Targeted Prompting, which provides effective debiasing for known biases but necessitates prior specification of bias in question; and General Prompting, which, while slightly less effective, offers debiasing across various categories. We leverage resource-efficient LLM debiasing using adapter tuning and compare the effectiveness of our synthetic data to existing debiasing datasets. Our results reveal that: (1) ChatGPT can efficiently produce high-quality training data for debiasing other LLMs; (2) data produced via our approach surpasses existing datasets in debiasing performance while also preserving internal knowledge of a pre-trained LLM; and (3) synthetic data exhibits generalizability across categories, effectively mitigating various biases, including intersectional ones. These findings underscore the potential of synthetic data in advancing the fairness of LLMs with minimal retraining cost.

Deep learning provides powerful methods to impute structured information from large-scale, unstructured text and image datasets. For example, economists might wish to detect the presence of economic activity in satellite images, or to measure the topics or entities mentioned in social media, the congressional record, or firm filings. This review introduces deep neural networks, covering methods such as classifiers, regression models, generative AI, and embedding models. Applications include classification, document digitization, record linkage, and methods for data exploration in massive scale text and image corpora. When suitable methods are used, deep learning models can be cheap to tune and can scale affordably to problems involving millions or billions of data points.. The review is accompanied by a companion website, EconDL, with user-friendly demo notebooks, software resources, and a knowledge base that provides technical details and additional applications.