AI Trust

A New AI “Journalist” Is Rewriting the News to Remove Bias

First, the site’s artificial intelligence (AI) chooses a story based on what’s popular on the internet right now. Once it picks a topic, it looks at more than a thousand news sources to gather details. Left-leaning sites, right-leaning sites – the AI looks at them all.

Then, the AI writes its own “impartial” version of the story based on what it finds (sometimes in as little as 60 seconds). This take on the news contains the most basic facts, with the AI striving to remove any potential bias. The AI also takes into account the “trustworthiness” of each source, something Knowhere’s co-founders preemptively determined. This ensures a site with a stellar reputation for accuracy isn’t overshadowed by one that plays a little fast and loose with the facts.

For some of the more political stories, the AI produces two additional versions labeled “Left” and “Right.” Those skew pretty much exactly how you’d expect from their headlines:

  • Impartial: “US to add citizenship question to 2020 census”
  • Left: “California sues Trump administration over census citizenship question”
  • Right: “Liberals object to inclusion of citizenship question on 2020 census”


Some controversial but not necessarily political stories receive “Positive” and “Negative” spins:

  • Impartial: “Facebook scans things you send on messenger, Mark Zuckerberg admits”
  • Positive: “Facebook reveals that it scans Messenger for inappropriate content”
  • Negative: “Facebook admits to spying on Messenger, ‘scanning’ private images and links”

Even the images used with the stories occasionally reflect the content’s bias. The “Positive” Facebook story features CEO Mark Zuckerberg grinning, while the “Negative” one has him looking like his dog just died.

So, impartial stories written by AI. Pretty neat? Sure. But society changing? We’ll probably need more than a clever algorithm for that.

Source: Futurism

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Twitter needs and asks for help – study finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor

Twitter wants experts to help it learn to be a less toxic place online.

Twitter launched a new initiative Thursday to find out exactly what it means to be a healthy social network in 2018.

CEO Jack Dorsey tweets acknowledging the problem

The company, which has been plagued by a number of election-meddling, harassment, bot, and scam-related scandals since the 2016 presidential election, announced that it was looking to partner with outside experts to help “identify how we measure the health of Twitter.”

The company said it was looking to find new ways to fight abuse and spam, and to encourage “healthy” debates and conversations.

Twitter is now inviting experts to help define “what health means for Twitter” by submitting proposals for studies.

Source: Wired  

Huge MIT Study of ‘Fake News’: Falsehoods Win on Twitter

Krista Kennell / Stone / Catwalker / Shutterstock / The Atlantic

Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information.

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds

that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor.

By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

their work has implications for Facebook, YouTube, and every major social network. Any platform that regularly amplifies engaging or provocative content runs the risk of amplifying fake news along with it.

Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods. Even when the researchers controlled for every difference between the accounts originating rumors—like whether that person had more followers or was verified—falsehoods were still 70 percent more likely to get retweeted than accurate news.

In short, social media seems to systematically amplify falsehood at the expense of the truth, and no one—neither experts nor politicians nor tech companies—knows how to reverse that trend.

It is a dangerous moment for any system of government premised on a common public reality.

Source: The Atlantic

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DeepMind’s new AI ethics unit

DeepMind made this announcement Oct 2017

Google-owned DeepMind has announced the formation of a major new AI research unit comprised of full-time staff and external advisors

DrAfter123/iStock

As we hand over more of our lives to artificial intelligence systems, keeping a firm grip on their ethical and societal impact is crucial.

DeepMind Ethics & Society (DMES), a unit comprised of both full-time DeepMind employees and external fellows, is the company’s latest attempt to scrutinise the societal impacts of the technologies it creates.

DMES will work alongside technologists within DeepMind and fund external research based on six areas: privacy transparency and fairness; economic impacts; governance and accountability; managing AI risk; AI morality and values; and how AI can address the world’s challenges.

Its aim, according to DeepMind, is twofold: to help technologists understand the ethical implications of their work and help society decide how AI can be beneficial.

“We want these systems in production to be our highest collective selves. We want them to be most respectful of human rights, we want them to be most respectful of all the equality and civil rights laws that have been so valiantly fought for over the last sixty years.” [Mustafa Suleyman]

Source: Wired

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wait … am I being manipulated on this topic by an Amazon-owned AI engine?

Image Credit: chombosan/Shutterstock

The other night, my nine-year-old daughter (who is, of course, the most tech-savvy person in the house), introduced me to a new Amazon Alexa skill.

“Alexa, start a conversation,” she said.

We were immediately drawn into an experience with new bot, or, as the technologists would say, “conversational user interface” (CUI).  It was, we were told, the recent winner in an Amazon AI competition from the University of Washington.

At first, the experience was fun, but when we chose to explore a technology topic, the bot responded, “have you heard of Net Neutrality?” What we experienced thereafter was slightly discomforting.

The bot seemingly innocuously cited a number of articles that she “had read on the web” about the FCC, Ajit Pai, and the issue of net neutrality. But here’s the thing: All four articles she recommended had a distinct and clear anti-Ajit Pai bias.

Now, the topic of Net Neutrality is a heated one and many smart people make valid points on both sides, including Fred Wilson and Ben Thompson. That is how it should be.

But the experience of the Alexa CUI should give you pause, as it did me.

To someone with limited familiarity with the topic of net neutrality, the voice seemed soothing and the information unbiased. But if you have a familiarity with the topic, you might start to wonder, “wait … am I being manipulated on this topic by an Amazon-owned AI engine to help the company achieve its own policy objectives?”

The experience highlights some of the risks of the AI-powered future into which we are hurtling at warp speed.

If you are going to trust your decision-making to a centralized AI source, you need to have 100 percent confidence in:

  • The integrity and security of the data (are the inputs accurate and reliable, and can they be manipulated or stolen?)
  • The machine learning algorithms that inform the AI (are they prone to excessive error or bias, and can they be inspected?)
  • The AI’s interface (does it reliably represent the output of the AI and effectively capture new data?)

In a centralized, closed model of AI, you are asked to implicitly trust in each layer without knowing what is going on behind the curtains.

Welcome to the world of Blockchain+AI.

3 blockchain projects tackling decentralized data and AI (click here to read the blockchain projects)

Source: Venture Beat



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