Artificial intelligence (AI)

Working on and with AI is inherently influenced by gender and race. The small number of women and minorities among AI developers has even been described as a "diversity crisis". At the same time, however, women from the Global South are strong in lowly-paid areas of the field, from hardware assembly to crowd work addressing bias and injustices in AI. Understanding these present discriminating structures is the first step to social change.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT blur the line between human and machine, at the same time captivating minds and raising alarms. Having been swiftly integrated into search engines and programmes, these bots lack clear boundaries. Jeffrey Chan dissects the ethical challenges and environmental impacts of AI bots, as well as navigating fair AI use and the language and wisdom boundary.

Aifric Campbell explores the future of love and intimacy as our attention to humans is seduced by machines.

What are the impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on human labour and the environment? How do legislative proposals for regulating AI in Europe and Brazil respond to these impacts beyond discussions on surveillance and automated decision-making bias?

In the following months, the Brazilian Senate will vote on a 10-article bill establishing principles for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Its content, however, may help perpetuate recent cases of algorithmic discrimination through provisions that hinder the accountability for AI-induced errors and restrict the scope of rights established in Brazil’s General Data Protection Legislation and in the Brazilian Constitution.

A Bill of Rights for the AI-enabled world, regulatory challenges, and socio-technical risks: Jessica Newman, who leads the AI Security Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, discusses recent AI developments in the United States and Europe with our Transatlantic Media Fellow Ekaterina Venkina in an interview for BigData-Insider.

How do we preserve our humanity in a world of intelligent machines? AI researcher Mark Nitzberg on the need to build AI models that are safe for humans and make explainable decisions – and why standards and oversight are key.  Our fellow Ekaterina Venkina interviewed the Executive Director at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley (CHAI) for RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND).

This Spotlight explores how the ability of AI to disseminate information more effectively is prone to abuse and can pose a threat to democracy. It then discusses the preconditions and potential of AI to support the building of a critical public sphere.

The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act aims to regulate emerging applications of AI in accordance with “EU values”. But for the most concerning of all such potential applications, the line between regulation and prohibition can be a tricky one to draw.