Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Polly Mackenzie et al: “There is now a broad consensus among practitioners, funders, and policymakers that Britain is paying the costs for a decades-long depletion of civic life. A great deal of excellent work has begun to reverse this decline, but a key question remains unanswered: how do we fund the work of civic renewal at the scale that is needed?
The Marshall Plan for Civic Life is a landmark programme of research and deliberation, convened by Kinship Works and Demos, to answer this question – identifying viable financing mechanisms, and developing an overall funding architecture. The initial work has been supported by This Day and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation but we are building a coalition – adding partners and modules to deepen our understanding of the problem and possible solutions.
In this opening Discussion Paper, we share initial reflections on a range of financial mechanisms that look promising. The paper is intended to stimulate discussion and we would welcome feedback. This will be followed in Autumn 2026 with a broader paper, describing a potential architecture and supporting philosophy for a Civic Marshall Plan, alongside an estimate of the scale of the funding gap that needs to be filled…(More)”.
Paper by Kevin A. Bryan & Joshua S. Gans: “AI predicts; humans use its predictions to make decisions. These predictions are combined with human verification and analysis, queries to other statistical models, and so on. The economic value of an AI, therefore, depends on how it interacts with the surrounding decision environment. We describe the value of AI as part of this “composite experiment” where AI makes a coarse prediction of the state of the world, show what this means for optimal model training via a geometric argument, explain why optimal training can be discontinuous in economic variables, and study how heterogeneous users or monopoly model trainers affect these results. In particular, maximizing the unconditional accuracy of AI predictions is generally suboptimal…(More)”.
Report by UNESCO: “Media freedom and journalism are under attack around the world. AI-fuelled disinformation is confusing and polarizing audiences, government censorship is sharply rising, physical and online violence towards journalists is increasing, and the journalism business model is failing. At the same time, funding for public media is declining, and drastic cuts to international aid and media development budgets have reduced the amount of reliable, independent journalism available to audiences globally.
This report explains why these cuts and attacks matter – and what is at stake when journalism declines and disappears. It synthesises the latest academic research on the value of journalism and its role in economics, national security and crises. The report is focused on public interest journalism, that is: reporting that is independent, accurate and ethical, and that seeks to inform the public about important issues affecting their lives, enable debate, and hold power to account.
The evidence collected here demonstrates that this journalism can have a profound and positive impact on societies and individuals globally. Its role supporting democracy is very well established: journalism shares the information citizens need to cast meaningful votes, it is a check and balance on power, and it acts as a conduit between citizens and elected officials.
But journalism’s impact goes far beyond that. As the evidence in the report indicates: Journalism is an economic enabler: it can reduce corruption, lower the cost of doing business, encourage the fair and transparent distribution of resources, and support economic growth and development. Journalism supports national security: it makes societies more resilient to disinformation and the interference of malicious actors, and reduces the risk of conflict and war.Journalism improves the response to crises: it provides information that saves lives, and improves preparation and response to disaster and crises.Journalism is also a surprisingly cost-effective way to achieve these positive outcomes, and it offers a high return on investment. As the evidence in this review shows, every $1 spent on journalism, can result in more than $100 in savings to the public through improved public services and reduced corruption. Journalism’s most significant impact, however, is that it plays a preventative and protective role – as part of a healthy information infrastructure…(More)”.
Article by Camille François et al: “…It has been challenging to define openness in the context of FMs, as definitions of “open source” software do not easily translate to AI systems. However, shared nomenclature is essential to developing shared understandings, norms, benchmarks, and best practices. By shared nomenclature, we mean establishing common terms across researchers, developers, policymakers, and civil society organizations working to unlock the benefits and mitigate the risks of FMs. We use AI systems here as shorthand for systems built with FMs, while recognizing the limitations and critiques of the term AI. This work is also necessary to illuminate the range of potential design choices around openness throughout the AI stack, and to ensure that this conversation moves beyond a narrow focus on model weights.
In this article, we survey existing approaches to defining openness in AI models and systems. We also propose a descriptive framework to evaluate how each component across the FM stack contributes to openness, enabling normative definitions of openness in AI. We intentionally do not present a definitive list of requirements for openness. This work builds on a February 2024 workshop convened by Mozilla and the Columbia Institute of Global Politics, which brought together more than 40 leading scholars and practitioners working on openness and AI. These individuals—spanning open source AI startups and companies, nonprofit AI labs, and civil society organizations—focused on exploring what open should mean in the current era of foundation models…(More)”.
Paper by Neil D Lawrence and Jessica K Montgomery: “Public dialogues have produced clear demand signals for AI. These dialogues imagine innovations that improve our shared wellbeing and prosperity while developing under democratic control. AI development has largely advanced along another trajectory. We argue that this gap is a structural feature of an innovation system whose incentives are captured by the attention economy. Closing it requires a different driver of the innovation cycle. We propose an attention reinvestment cycle, in which efficiency gains accrue as freed time that can be invested in community innovation, with frontline professionals adapting and sharing tools that meet priority needs. Operating the cycle at scale requires institutional infrastructure—dialogic, absorptive, and distributive capacities—that the existing science-policy system has yet to develop…(More)”.
Release by University College London: “A major new resource that provides one of the most comprehensive pictures yet of what people are eating around the world has been introduced in a new study by a UCL and University of Oxford researcher.
From obesity and heart disease to climate change and food affordability, many of today’s biggest challenges are shaped by what we eat. But there is a surprisingly basic problem facing researchers and policymakers: We often don’t know with enough accuracy what people are actually consuming.
The new study, published in Nature Food and authored by Professor Marco Springmann (UCL Institute for Global Health as well as the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford), introduces the Global Dietary Database for Impact Assessments (GDD-IA), which is freely available through an interactive online explorer, allowing users to investigate dietary patterns across countries and over time.
The GDD-IA combines information on food production, food waste, dietary surveys and human energy requirements to estimate what people eat from 1990 to 2020. It includes detail by age, sex and whether people live in urban or rural areas.
The resource has been designed to support research into some of the world’s most pressing questions: How do diets affect human health? What impact do they have on climate change and the environment? How affordable are healthy and sustainable diets for different populations?..(More)”.
Book by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson: “For consumers living in a digitally-connected world, smart technologies have built an inescapable trap of digital self-surveillance. Smart cars, smart homes, smart watches, and smart medical devices track our most private activities and intimate patterns. While these devices allow users to receive personal insights by monitoring their every move, that data can be accessed by police and prosecutors looking to find incriminating clues. Digital technology exposes everyone, everywhere, all at once, and we have few laws to regulate it.
In Your Data Will Be Used Against You, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson warns us of how the rise of sensor-driven technology, social media monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be weaponized against democratic values and personal freedoms. At the same time, that data will solve crimes, radically transforming how criminal cases are prosecuted. Ferguson explores how this proliferation of private data in combination with public surveillance networks promises new ways to solve previously unsolvable crimes, but also leaves us vulnerable to governmental overreach and abuse. He argues for legal interventions that address the threat of digital self-surveillance and provides concrete suggestions about how legislators, judges, and communities should respond…(More)”.
Article by Ioannis Chrysakis et al: “The 2020 European Strategy for Data aims at developing Common European Data Spaces as a means to build a pan-European single market for data, thereby supporting economic growth and maximizing citizens’ use of data. It demands data spaces in strategic sectors, with capabilities for effective data management and sharing. Although several initiatives support their adoption, data spaces are still in the early stages of development and face several data management and sharing challenges. To identify the requirements needed to address these challenges, we review the literature in developing a conceptual framework for applying data management and sharing in the context of data spaces. We then evaluate the practical implementation of the proposed solutions by analysing six representative European-funded projects. Focusing on requirements from trust and business models to interoperability, workflow orchestration, energy efficiency, and data quality, the work highlights prominent issues and explains how each project addresses them through technical means. Our evaluation outlines each project’s aim and contribution, along with a representative use case from different domains, e.g., water, agriculture, and energy. We recognize widely accepted strategies such as the use of semantic standards, data catalogues, distributed ledger technologies for trust enhancement, and federated identity management. This work highlights recurring patterns, common practices, and key differences in implementation and identifies open research gaps. Thus, it aims to inform future initiatives and provide concrete recommendations to researchers and practitioners on achieving data spaces with best practices. As the field matures, the work hopes to help achieve scalable, stable, and cross-domain data spaces that support sustainable innovation and long-term collaboration throughout Europe…(More)”.
Article by Jack Hardinges, and Irina Bejan: “Attribution has always been a cornerstone of working with other people’s creativity and knowledge.
As Creative Commons reminds us, practicing attribution serves many important functions, from providing verifiable evidence of a claim, to paying respect to the work of others, and creating pathways for traffic and financial value to flow.
Despite the importance of attribution, many of today’s AI systems fail to acknowledge the sources of knowledge and creativity that make them possible.
A recent study led by the AI Disclosures Project found that more than 30% of responses by leading search-enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) provided no attribution whatsoever. Even where attribution is provided, it can be limited in ways that are hidden to users, and deep technical challenges persist in connecting outputs from AI to the sources they are derived from.
Despite this, we believe there are good reasons to be optimistic that AI systems can attribute the sources they use. Not perfectly, and not always, but enough and improving, such that we should reject the argument that a lack of attribution is an inevitable side effect of the way the technology works. The commons needn’t become “hidden substrate.”..(More)”.
Article by Alexandra Bruell: “One of the richest sources of online information is re-evaluating its relationship with Google.
Reddit, the online message board that powers a swath of Google search results, has discussed shutting off the technology giant’s access to its content for AI use, according to people familiar with the matter.
It is part of a growing chorus of online media companies expressing frustration with the tech giant as AI changes the way people ask questions, siphons off search traffic and upends publishers’ revenue models. They say the search engine is no longer a reliable source of visitors, especially after Alphabet’s GOOGL Google expanded its AI search features in recent months. USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People Inc. and Reuters are all evaluating how, or even if, they will continue to work with Google.
Reddit struck a $60 million-a-year deal in 2024 that allowed Google to use its material to train AI models. But with AI-generated answers to queries reducing clicks to outside websites, Reddit executives are assessing what the upside is of continuing to feed its content to Google, said the people familiar with the matter. The companies are in talks about potentially renewing their deal, which is ending soon.
“This is existential for some categories of publishers,” said David Buttle, CEO of media consulting firm DJB Strategies. “They are looking at more radical things.”..(More)”.