Research and media stories often highlight how digital technologies have had a negative impact on our lives. But what might it mean to set out a vision of the ‘digital good’? Director of a new ESRC-funded network focused on the digital good, Helen Kenn…
Category: artificial intelligence
Is openness in AI research always the answer?
As research into AI has become more developed, so too has the understanding that AI research might be misused. Discussing OpenAI’s recent decision to withhold the source code for an algorithm designed to replicate handwriting, citing concerns for the public good, Gabrielle Samuel argues that blanket commitments to openness are insufficient to protect against the potential ‘dual-use’ of AI research […]
Death of the author? AI generated books and the production of scientific knowledge
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been applied to an increasing number of creative tasks from the composition of music, to painting and more recently the creation of academic texts. Reflecting on this development Harry Collins, considers how we might understand AI in the context of academic writing and warns that we should not confuse the work of algorithms with tacit complex […]
Book Review: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard
In Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, Meredith Broussard adds to the growing literature exploring the limits of artificial intelligence (AI) and techno-solutionism, furthermore showing how its socially-constructed nature replicates existing structural inequalities. Calling for greater racial and gender diversity in tech, the book offers a timely, accessible and often entertaining account that sets the record straight on what current approaches to […]
Data-driven discrimination: a new challenge for civil society
Data-driven technologies have been a transformative force in society. However, while such innovations are often viewed as a positive development, discriminatory biases embedded in these technologies can serve to compound problems for society’s more vulnerable groups. Having recently published a report on automated discrimination in data-driven systems, Jędrzej Niklas and Seeta Peña Gangadharan explain how algorithms discriminate, why this raises […]
What a fossil revolution reveals about the history of “big data”
Improved technologies have allowed faster and more powerful statistical analysis and changed how we “see” data. It’s now taken for granted that the best way to understand large, complex phenomena is by crunching the numbers via computers and projecting the results as visual summaries. To David Sepkoski, that’s not a bad thing, but it does pose some challenges. The complexity […]
Artificial intelligence can expedite scientific communication and eradicate bias from the publishing process
Scientific publishing already uses some early artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to address certain issues with the peer review process, such as identifying new reviewers or fighting plagiarism. As part of a BioMed Central/Digital Science report on the future of peer review, Chadwick C. DeVoss outlines what other innovations AI might facilitate. Software with the capability to complete subject-oriented reviews of […]