How AI Is Reshaping Diplomacy and Global Affairs

With artificial intelligence putting productivity on hyperspeed, the painstaking but often slow nature of dealing with other countries, as well as policymaking, is also forced to speed up. But a panel at the forefront of these changes at the BRIDGE Summit in Abu Dhabi--which convenes creators, policymakers, investors, technologists, media institutions, and cultural leaders around the world to discuss the future of media--said that breaking things fast is not without consequences. "Decision makers are being asked to make decisions very quickly on the basis of information that may not be verified or verifiable," Elizabeth Churchill, a professor of Human-Computer Interaction from the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, told moderator Nikhil Kumar, an executive editor at TIME, which is a media partner of the BRIDGE Summit. Churchill, who held senior roles in firms like Google and Yahoo, said she returned to academia to explore transparent and "interrogable" AI tools and content that is effectively watermarked--so that decision-makers know at a glance if information is trustworthy. She said current shortfalls in information quality are "very much a design problem that sits at the surface of all of the tools that we use and in diplomacy conversations many different people are using."