Beyond checking a box: how a social licence can help communities benefit from data reuse and AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Peter Addo: “In theory, consent offers a mechanism to reduce power imbalances. In reality, existing consent mechanisms are limited and, in many respects, archaic, based on binary distinctions – typically presented in check-the-box forms that most websites use to ask you to register for marketing e-mails – that fail to appreciate the nuance and context-sensitive nature of data reuse. Consent today generally means individual consent, a notion that overlooks the broader needs of communities and groups.

While we understand the need to safeguard information about an individual such as, say, their health status, this information can help address or even prevent societal health crises. Individualised notions of consent fail to consider the potential public good of reusing individual data responsibly. This makes them particularly problematic in societies that have more collective orientations, where prioritising individual choices could disrupt the social fabric.

The notion of a social licence, which has its roots in the 1990s within the extractive industries, refers to the collective acceptance of an activity, such as data reuse, based on its perceived alignment with community values and interests. Social licences go beyond the priorities of individuals and help balance the risks of data misuse and missed use (for example, the risks of violating privacy vs. neglecting to use private data for public good). Social licences permit a broader notion of consent that is dynamic, multifaceted and context-sensitive.

Policymakers, citizens, health providers, think tanks, interest groups and private industry must accept the concept of a social licence before it can be established. The goal for all stakeholders is to establish widespread consensus on community norms and an acceptable balance of social risk and opportunity.

Community engagement can create a consensus-based foundation for preferences and expectations concerning data reuse. Engagement could take place via dedicated “data assemblies” or community deliberations about data reuse for particular purposes under particular conditions. The process would need to involve voices as representative as possible of the different parties involved, and include those that are traditionally marginalised or silenced…(More)”.

Global Trends in Government Innovation 2024

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Governments worldwide are transforming public services through innovative approaches that place people at the center of design and delivery. This report analyses nearly 800 case studies from 83 countries and identifies five critical trends in government innovation that are reshaping public services. First, governments are working with users and stakeholders to co-design solutions and anticipate future needs to create flexible, responsive, resilient and sustainable public services. Second, governments are investing in scalable digital infrastructure, experimenting with emergent technologies (such as automation, AI and modular code), and expanding innovative and digital skills to make public services more efficient. Third, governments are making public services more personalised and proactive to better meet people’s needs and expectations and reduce psychological costs and administrative frictions, ensuring they are more accessible, inclusive and empowering, especially for persons and groups in vulnerable and disadvantaged circumstances. Fourth, governments are drawing on traditional and non-traditional data sources to guide public service design and execution. They are also increasingly using experimentation to navigate highly complex and unpredictable environments. Finally, governments are reframing public services as opportunities and channels for citizens to exercise their civic engagement and hold governments accountable for upholding democratic values such as openness and inclusion…(More)”.

Direct democracy in the digital age: opportunities, challenges, and new approaches

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Pattharapong Rattanasevee, Yared Akarapattananukul & Yodsapon Chirawut: “This article delves into the evolving landscape of direct democracy, particularly in the context of the digital era, where ICT and digital platforms play a pivotal role in shaping democratic engagement. Through a comprehensive analysis of empirical data and theoretical frameworks, it evaluates the advantages and inherent challenges of direct democracy, such as majority tyranny, short-term focus, polarization, and the spread of misinformation. It proposes the concept of Liquid democracy as a promising hybrid model that combines direct and representative elements, allowing for voting rights delegation to trusted entities, thereby potentially mitigating some of the traditional drawbacks of direct democracy. Furthermore, the article underscores the necessity for legal regulations and constitutional safeguards to protect fundamental rights and ensure long-term sustainability within a direct democracy framework. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse on democratic innovation and highlights the need for a balanced approach to integrating digital tools with democratic processes…(More)”.

Announcing SPARROW: A Breakthrough AI Tool to Measure and Protect Earth’s Biodiversity in the Most Remote Places

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Juan Lavista Ferres: “The biodiversity of our planet is rapidly declining. We’ve likely reached a tipping point where it is crucial to use every tool at our disposal to help preserve what remains. That’s why I am pleased to announce SPARROW—Solar-Powered Acoustic and Remote Recording Observation Watch, developed by Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab. SPARROW is an AI-powered edge computing solution designed to operate autonomously in the most remote corners of the planet. Solar-powered and equipped with advanced sensors, it collects biodiversity data—from camera traps, acoustic monitors, and other environmental detectors—that are processed using our most advanced PyTorch-based wildlife AI models on low-energy edge GPUs. The resulting critical information is then transmitted via low-Earth orbit satellites directly to the cloud, allowing researchers to access fresh, actionable insights in real time, no matter where they are. 

Think of SPARROW as a network of Earth-bound satellites, quietly observing and reporting on the health of our ecosystems without disrupting them. By leveraging solar energy, these devices can run for a long time, minimizing their footprint and any potential harm to the environment…(More)”.

A linkless internet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Collin Jennings: “..But now Google and other websites are moving away from relying on links in favour of artificial intelligence chatbots. Considered as preserved trails of connected ideas, links make sense as early victims of the AI revolution since large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others abstract the information represented online and present it in source-less summaries. We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself – the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web – is in danger of going extinct. So it’s pertinent to ask: how did links come to represent information in the first place? And what’s at stake in the movement away from links toward AI chat interfaces?

To answer these questions, we need to go back to the 17th century, when writers and philosophers developed the theory of mind that ultimately inspired early hypertext plans. In this era, prominent philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, debated the extent to which a person controls the succession of ideas that appears in her mind. They posited that the succession of ideas reflects the interaction between the data received from the senses and one’s mental faculties – reason and imagination. Subsequently, David Hume argued that all successive ideas are linked by association. He enumerated three kinds of associative connections among ideas: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume offers examples of each relationship:

A picture naturally leads our thoughts to the original: the mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry or discourse concerning the others: and if we think of a wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it.

The mind follows connections found in the world. Locke and Hume believed that all human knowledge comes from experience, and so they had to explain how the mind receives, processes and stores external data. They often reached for media metaphors to describe the relationship between the mind and the world. Locke compared the mind to a blank tablet, a cabinet and a camera obscura. Hume relied on the language of printing to distinguish between the vivacity of impressions imprinted upon one’s senses and the ideas recalled in the mind…(More)”.

Harnessing AI: How to develop and integrate automated prediction systems for humanitarian anticipatory action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

CEPR Report: “Despite unprecedented access to data, resources, and wealth, the world faces an escalating wave of humanitarian crises. Armed conflict, climate-induced disasters, and political instability are displacing millions and devastating communities. Nearly one in every five children are living in or fleeing conflict zones (OCHA, 2024). Often the impacts of conflict and climatic hazards – such as droughts and flood – exacerbate each other, leading to even greater suffering. As crises unfold and escalate, the need for timely and effective humanitarian action becomes paramount.

Sophisticated systems for forecasting and monitoring natural and man-made hazards have emerged as critical tools to help inform and prompt action. The full potential for the use of such automated forecasting systems to inform anticipatory action (AA) is immense but is still to be realised. By providing early warnings and predictive insights, these systems could help organisations allocate resources more efficiently, plan interventions more effectively, and ultimately save lives and prevent or reduce humanitarian impact.


This Policy Insight provides an account of the significant technical, ethical, and organisational difficulties involved in such systems, and the current solutions in place…(More)”.

Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset Funded by OpenAI and Microsoft

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kate Knibbs: “Harvard University announced Thursday it’s releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly 1 million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. The dataset was created by Harvard’s newly formed Institutional Data Initiative with funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI. It contains books scanned as part of the Google Books project that are no longer protected by copyright.

Around five times the size of the notorious Books3 dataset that was used to train AI models like Meta’s Llama, the Institutional Data Initiative’s database spans genres, decades, and languages, with classics from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Dante included alongside obscure Czech math textbooks and Welsh pocket dictionaries. Greg Leppert, executive director of the Institutional Data Initiative, says the project is an attempt to “level the playing field” by giving the general public, including small players in the AI industry and individual researchers, access to the sort of highly-refined and curated content repositories that normally only established tech giants have the resources to assemble. “It’s gone through rigorous review,” he says…(More)”.

The Recommendation on Information Integrity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Recommendation: “…The digital transformation of societies has reshaped how people interact and engage with information. Advancements in digital technologies and novel forms of communication have changed the way information is produced, shared, and consumed, locally and globally and across all media. Technological changes and the critical importance of online information platforms offer unprecedented access to information, foster citizen engagement and connection, and allow for innovative news reporting. However, they can also provide a fertile ground for the rapid spread of false, altered, or misleading content. In addition, new generative AI tools have greatly reduced the barriers to creating and spreading content.

Promoting the availability and free flow of high-quality, evidence-based information is key to upholding individuals’ ability to seek and receive information and ideas of all kinds and to safeguarding freedom of opinion and expression. 

The volume of content to which citizens are exposed can obscure and saturate public debates and help widen societal divisions. In this context, the quality of civic discourse declines as evidence-based information, which helps people make sense of their social environment, becomes harder to find. This reality has acted as a catalyst for governments to explore more closely the roles they can play, keeping as a priority in our democracies the necessity that governments should not exercise control of the information ecosystem and that, on the contrary, they support an environment where a plurality of information sources, views, and opinions can thrive…Building on the detailed policy framework outlined in the OECD report Facts not Fakes: Tackling Disinformation, Strengthening Information Integrity, the Recommendation provides an ambitious and actionable international standard that will help governments develop a systemic approach to foster information integrity, relying on a multi-stakeholder approach…(More)”.

How Years of Reddit Posts Have Made the Company an AI Darling

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sarah E. Needleman: “Artificial-intelligence companies were one of Reddit’s biggest frustrations last year. Now they are a key source of growth for the social-media platform. 

These companies have an insatiable appetite for online data to train their models and display content in an easy-to-digest format. In mid-2023, Reddit, a social-media veteran and IPO newbie, turned off the spigot and began charging some businesses for access to its data. 

It turns out that Reddit’s ever-growing 19-year warehouse of user commentary makes it an attractive resource for AI companies. The platform recently reported its first quarterly profit as a publicly traded company, thanks partly to data-licensing deals it made in the past year with OpenAI and Google.

Reddit Chief Executive and co-founder Steve Huffman has said the company had to stop giving away its valuable data to the world’s largest companies for free. 

“It is an arms race,” he said at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference in October. “But we’re in talks with just about everybody, so we’ll see where these things land.”

Reddit’s huge amount of data works well for AI companies because it is organized by topics and uses a voting system instead of an algorithm to sort content quality, and because people’s posts tend to be candid.

For the first nine months of 2024, Reddit’s revenue category that includes licensing grew to $81.6 million from $12.3 million a year earlier.

While data-licensing revenue remains dwarfed by Reddit’s core advertising sales, the new category’s rapid growth reveals a potential lucrative business line with relatively high margins.

Diversifying away from a reliance on advertising, while tapping into an AI-adjacent market, has also made Reddit attractive to investors who are searching for new exposure to the latest technology boom. Reddit’s stock has more than doubled in the past three months.

The source of Reddit’s newfound wealth is the burgeoning market for AI-useful data. Reddit’s willingness to sell its data to AI outfits makes it stand out, because there is only a finite amount of data available for AI companies to gobble up for free or purchase. Some executives and researchers say the industry’s need for high-quality text could outstrip supply within two years, potentially slowing AI’s development…(More)”.

The politics of data justice: exit, voice, or rehumanisation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Azadeh Akbari: “Although many data justice projects envision just datafied societies, their focus on participatory ‘solutions’ to remedy injustice leaves important discussions out. For example, there has been little discussion of the meaning of data justice and its participatory underpinnings in authoritarian contexts. Additionally, the subjects of data justice are treated as universal decision-making individuals unaffected by the procedures of datafication itself. To tackle such questions, this paper starts with studying the trajectory of data justice as a concept and reflects on both its data and justice elements. It conceptualises data as embedded within a network of associations opening up a multi-level, multi-actor, intersectional understanding of data justice. Furthermore, it discusses five major conceptualisations of data justice based on social justice, capabilities, structural, sphere transgression, and abnormality of justice approaches. Discussing the limits and potentials of each of these categories, the paper argues that many of the existing participatory approaches are formulated within the neoliberal binary of choice: exit or voice (Hirschman, Citation1970). Transcending this binary and using postcolonial theories, the paper discusses the dehumanisation of individuals and groups as an integral part of datafication and underlines the inadequacy of digital harms, data protection, and privacy discourses in that regard. Finally, the paper reflects on the politics of data justice as an emancipatory concept capable of transforming standardised concepts such as digital literacy to liberating pedagogies for reclaiming the lost humanity of the oppressed (Freire, Citation1970) or evoking the possibility for multiple trajectories beyond the emerging hegemony of data capitalism…(More)”.