Re: Artificial Intelligence and Group Deliberation

Mark,

Thank you for the useful hyperlink about differentiable technological development.


I see your points about personalization, preferences, and configurability. It seems that we can envision something like a configurable advanced Grammarly which would be equally available to all participants, councilmembers, representatives, legislators, and Congresspeople. Perhaps the composition-related functionalities in Web browsers' AI-enhanced sidebars may evolve into something similar.

When I consider lawyers in courtrooms and participants in group deliberations (e.g., legislators) what comes to my mind, in this particular discussion, is that I hope that they are all, or that their staffs are all, equally technologically proficient. Imagine a courtroom where one party’s lawyer had a laptop connected to a suite of advanced tools via Wi-Fi Internet while the other lawyer had a briefcase with a stack of papers.

Judicial and legislative systems seem to be more intuitively fair when all of the participants are equally proficient and equally equipped with preparation-related and performance-related tools. There could even be "arms race" scenarios in terms of speechwriting assistants, debate coaches, and other preparation-enhancing and performance-enhancing tools.

Arguments for advanced forum software (e.g., features delivered via plugins for social media software) include, but are not limited to, that:

  1.  Some of these tools should obtain and process discussion contexts to provide better composition-related advice to each user.
     *   However, per-user tools like advanced Grammarly or Web browser sidebar composition tool could, in theory, scrape the entireties of discussion threads, from webpages, up to the posts being authored (perhaps utilizing HTML5 document metadata, Web schema, or linked data) to deliver better advice requiring discussion contexts.
  2.  Some of the tools under discussion are useful for evaluating the posts of other users or evaluating combinations of posts from multiple users, entire threads, as they unfold.



Best regards,

Adam

________________________________
From: Mark Hampton <mark.hampton@ieee.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 8, 2023 7:14 AM
To: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Cc: public-humancentricai@w3.org <public-humancentricai@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Group Deliberation

Hi Adam,

I imagine those tools would need to be personalized (I'd prefer owned by the user), one person's propaganda is another's preference. There would be broader dynamics that could be spotted through collaboration of those personalized systems sharing information or using shared sources of information.

There is an almost certain risk of information overload and that seems to make people more manipulable. If human centric means caring for humans then I think we need to be careful. Human centric AI could become a way of accelerating AI rather than caring for humans - I would really like to see human centric AI leading to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_technological_development rather than mitigations for inhuman technologies.

The current direction of technological progress does not seem very human centric at all. The work to build technical solutions to problems introduced by technology seems to be a symptom of this. I don't see any current very important short/medium term human material problems that need AI but I'm open to being convinced otherwise. Technologists (and I speak as one) risk to have a hard time accepting they are part of the problem rather than the solution.

An off the cuff reaction but I hope it is of some use to you.

Kind regards,
  Mark


On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 12:57 AM Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com<mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com>> wrote:
Human-centric AI Community Group,

Something that Timothy Holborn said in a recent letter to this mailing list reminded me of some thoughts that I had about AI a few years ago. At that time, I was considering uses of AI technology for supporting city-scale e-democracies and e-townhalls. I collated a preliminary non-exhaustive list of tasks that AI could perform to enhance public discussion forums:

  1.  Performing fact-checking
  2.  Performing argument analysis
  3.  Detecting spin, persuasion, and manipulation
  4.  Performing sentiment analysis
  5.  Detecting frame building and frame setting
  6.  Detecting agenda building and agenda setting
  7.  Detecting various sociolinguistic, social semiotic, sociocultural and memetic events
  8.  Detecting the dynamics of the attention of individuals, groups and the public
  9.  Detecting occurrences of cognitive biases in individual and group decision-making processes

With respect to point 3, a worry is that some participants in a community might make use of AI tools to amplify the rhetoric used to convey their points of view. These were concerns about technologies like: "virtual speechwriting assistant" and "virtual debate coach".

Some participants of an e-townhall or social media forum might make use of AI tools to spin, to persuade, to manipulate the other members for their own reasons or interests or might do so on behalf of other parties who would pay them.

My thoughts were that technologies could mitigate these technological concerns. Technologies could monitor large-scale group discussions, on behalf of the participants, while serving as tools available to all of the participants. For example, AI could warn content posters before they posted contentious content (contentious per their agreed-upon rules) and subsequently place visible icons on contentious posts, e.g., content detected to contain spin, persuasion, or manipulation.

I was brainstorming about solutions where AI systems could enhance group deliberation, could serve all of the participants simultaneously and in an open and transparent manner, and could ensure that reason prevailed from group discussions and deliberations. Today, with tools like GPT-4, some of these thoughts about humans and AI systems interoperating in public forums, e-townhall forums and social media, seem to be once again relevant. Any thoughts on these topics?


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski