Paper by Laura Espinosa and Marcel Salathé: “Online public health discourse is becoming more and more important in shaping public health dynamics. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a scalable solution for analysing the vast amounts of unstructured text found on online platforms. Here, we explore the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT models and open-source alternatives, for extracting public stances towards vaccination from social media posts. Using an expert-annotated dataset of social media posts related to vaccination, we applied various LLMs and a rule-based sentiment analysis tool to classify the stance towards vaccination. We assessed the accuracy of these methods through comparisons with expert annotations and annotations obtained through crowdsourcing. Our results demonstrate that few-shot prompting of best-in-class LLMs are the best performing methods, and that all alternatives have significant risks of substantial misclassification. The study highlights the potential of LLMs as a scalable tool for public health professionals to quickly gauge public opinion on health policies and interventions, offering an efficient alternative to traditional data analysis methods. With the continuous advancement in LLM development, the integration of these models into public health surveillance systems could substantially improve our ability to monitor and respond to changing public health attitudes…(More)”.
Behavioural science: could supermarket loyalty cards nudge us to make healthier choices?
Article by Magda Osman: “Ken Murphy, CEO of the British multinational supermarket chain Tesco, recently said at a conference that Tesco “could use Clubcard data to nudge customers towards healthier choices”.
So how would this work, and do we want it? Our recent study, published in the Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews, provides an answer.
Loyalty schemes have been around as far back as the 1980s, with the introduction of airlines’ frequent flyer programmes.
Advancements in loyalty schemes have been huge, with some even using gamified approaches, such as leaderboards, trophies and treasure hunts, to keep us engaged. The loyalty principle relies on a form of social exchange, namely reciprocity.
The ongoing reciprocal relationship means that we use a good or service regularly because we trust the service provider, we are satisfied with the service, and we deem the rewards we get as reasonable – be they discounts, vouchers or gifts.
In exchange, we accept that, in many cases, loyalty schemes collect data on us. Our purchasing history, often tied to our demographics, generates improvements in the delivery of the service.
If we accept this, then we continue to benefit from reward schemes, such as promotional offers or other discounts. The effectiveness depends not only on making attractive offers to us for things we are interested in purchasing, but also other discounted items that we hadn’t considered buying…(More)”
Deliberative Technology: Designing AI and Computational Democracy for Peacebuilding in Highly-Polarized Contexts
Report by Lisa Schirch: “This is a report on an international workshop for 45 peacebuilders, co-hosted by Toda Peace Institute and the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in June 2024. Emphasizing citizen participation and collective intelligence, the workshop explored the intersection of digital democracy and algorithmic technologies designed to enhance democratic processes. Central to the discussions were deliberative technologies, a new class of tools that facilitate collective discussion and decision-making by incorporating both qualitative and quantitative inputs, supported by bridging algorithms and AI. The workshop provided a comprehensive overview of how these innovative approaches and technologies can contribute to more inclusive and effective democratic processes, particularly in contexts marked by polarization and conflict…(More)”
The illusion of information adequacy
Paper by Hunter Gehlbach , Carly D. Robinson, Angus Fletcher: “How individuals navigate perspectives and attitudes that diverge from their own affects an array of interpersonal outcomes from the health of marriages to the unfolding of international conflicts. The finesse with which people negotiate these differing perceptions depends critically upon their tacit assumptions—e.g., in the bias of naïve realism people assume that their subjective construal of a situation represents objective truth. The present study adds an important assumption to this list of biases: the illusion of information adequacy. Specifically, because individuals rarely pause to consider what information they may be missing, they assume that the cross-section of relevant information to which they are privy is sufficient to adequately understand the situation. Participants in our preregistered study (N = 1261) responded to a hypothetical scenario in which control participants received full information and treatment participants received approximately half of that same information. We found that treatment participants assumed that they possessed comparably adequate information and presumed that they were just as competent to make thoughtful decisions based on that information. Participants’ decisions were heavily influenced by which cross-section of information they received. Finally, participants believed that most other people would make a similar decision to the one they made. We discuss the implications in the context of naïve realism and other biases that implicate how people navigate differences of perspective…(More)”.
Ensuring citizens’ assemblies land
Article by Graham Smith: “…the evidence shows that while the recommendations of assemblies are well considered and could help shape more robust policy, too often they fail to land. Why is this?
The simple answer is that so much time, resources and energy is spent on organising the assembly itself – ensuring the best possible experience for citizens – that the relationship with the local authority and its decision-making processes is neglected.
First, the question asked of the assembly does not always relate to a specific set of decisions about to be made by an authority. Is the relevant policy process open and ready for input? On a number of occasions assemblies have taken place just after a new policy or strategy has been agreed. Disastrous timing.
This does not mean assemblies should only be run when they are tied to a particular decision-making process. Sometimes it is important to open up a policy area with a broad question. And sometimes it makes sense to empower citizens to set the agenda and focus on the issues they find most compelling
The second element is the failure of authorities to prepare to receive recommendations from citizens.
One story is where the first a public official knew about an assembly was when its recommendations landed on their desk. They were not received in the best spirit.
Too often assemblies are commissioned by enthusiastic politicians and public officials who have not done the necessary work to ensure their colleagues are willing to give a considered response to the citizens’ recommendations. Too often an assembly will be organised by a department or ministry where the results require others in the authority to respond – but those other politicians and officials feel no connection to the process.
And too often, an assembly ends, and it is not clear who within the public authority has the responsibility to take the recommendations forward to ensure they are given a fair hearing across the authority.
For citizens’ assemblies to be effective requires political and administrative work well beyond just organising the assembly. If this is not done, it is not only a waste of resources, but it can do serious damage to democracy and trust as those citizens who have invested their time and energy into the process become disillusioned.
Those authorities where citizens’ assemblies have had meaningful impacts are those that have not only invested in the assembly, but also into preparing the authority to receive the recommendations. Often this has meant continuing support and resourcing for assembly members after the process. They are the best advocates for their work…(More)”
Asserting the public interest in health data: On the ethics of data governance for biobanks and insurers
Paper by Kathryne Metcalf and Jathan Sadowski : “Recent reporting has revealed that the UK Biobank (UKB)—a large, publicly-funded research database containing highly-sensitive health records of over half a million participants—has shared its data with private insurance companies seeking to develop actuarial AI systems for analyzing risk and predicting health. While news reports have characterized this as a significant breach of public trust, the UKB contends that insurance research is “in the public interest,” and that all research participants are adequately protected from the possibility of insurance discrimination via data de-identification. Here, we contest both of these claims. Insurers use population data to identify novel categories of risk, which become fodder in the production of black-boxed actuarial algorithms. The deployment of these algorithms, as we argue, has the potential to increase inequality in health and decrease access to insurance. Importantly, these types of harms are not limited just to UKB participants: instead, they are likely to proliferate unevenly across various populations within global insurance markets via practices of profiling and sorting based on the synthesis of multiple data sources, alongside advances in data analysis capabilities, over space/time. This necessitates a significantly expanded understanding of the publics who must be involved in biobank governance and data-sharing decisions involving insurers…(More)”.
Data’s Role in Unlocking Scientific Potential
Report by the Special Competitive Studies Project: “…we outline two actionable steps the U.S. government can take immediately to address the data sharing challenges hindering scientific research.
1. Create Comprehensive Data Inventories Across Scientific Domains
We recommend the Secretary of Commerce, acting through the Department of Commerce’s Chief Data Officer and the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and with the Federal Chief Data Officer Council (CDO Council) create a government-led inventory where organizations – universities, industries, and research institutes – can catalog their datasets with key details like purpose, description, and accreditation. Similar to platforms like data.gov, this centralized repository would make high-quality data more visible and accessible, promoting scientific collaboration. To boost participation, the government could offer incentives, such as grants or citation credits for researchers whose data is used. Contributing organizations would also be responsible for regularly updating their entries, ensuring the data stays relevant and searchable.
2. Create Scientific Data Sharing Public-Private Partnerships
A critical recommendation of the National Data Action Plan was for the United States to facilitate the creation of data sharing public-private partnerships for specific sectors. The U.S. Government should coordinate data sharing partnerships with its departments and agencies, industry, academia, and civil society. Data collected by one entity can be tremendously valuable to others. But incentivizing data sharing is challenging as privacy, security, legal (e.g., liability), and intellectual property (IP) concerns can limit willingness to share. However, narrowly-scoped PPPs can help overcome these barriers, allowing for greater data sharing and mutually beneficial data use…(More)”
Can LLMs advance democratic values?
Paper by Seth Lazar and Lorenzo Manuali: “LLMs are among the most advanced tools ever devised for analysing and generating linguistic content. Democratic deliberation and decision-making involve, at several distinct stages, the production and analysis of language. So it is natural to ask whether our best tools for manipulating language might prove instrumental to one of our most important linguistic tasks. Researchers and practitioners have recently asked whether LLMs can support democratic deliberation by leveraging abilities to summarise content, as well as to aggregate opinion over summarised content, and indeed to represent voters by predicting their preferences over unseen choices. In this paper, we assess whether using LLMs to perform these and related functions really advances the democratic values that inspire these experiments. We suggest that the record is decidedly mixed. In the presence of background inequality of power and resources, as well as deep moral and political disagreement, we should be careful not to use LLMs in ways that automate non-instrumentally valuable components of the democratic process, or else threaten to supplant fair and transparent decision-making procedures that are necessary to reconcile competing interests and values. However, while we argue that LLMs should be kept well clear of formal democratic decision-making processes, we think that they can be put to good use in strengthening the informal public sphere: the arena that mediates between democratic governments and the polities that they serve, in which political communities seek information, form civic publics, and hold their leaders to account…(More)”.
AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose
Paper by Masato Sakai, Akihisa Sakurai, Siyuan Lu, and Marcus Freitag: “It took nearly a century to discover a total of 430 figurative Nazca geoglyphs, which offer significant insights into the ancient cultures at the Nazca Pampa. Here, we report the deployment of an AI system to the entire Nazca region, a UNESCO World Heritage site, leading to the discovery of 303 new figurative geoglyphs within only 6 mo of field survey, nearly doubling the number of known figurative geoglyphs. Even with limited training examples, the developed AI approach is demonstrated to be effective in detecting the smaller relief-type geoglyphs, which unlike the giant line-type geoglyphs are very difficult to discern. The improved account of figurative geoglyphs enables us to analyze their motifs and distribution across the Nazca Pampa. We find that relief-type geoglyphs depict mainly human motifs or motifs of things modified by humans, such as domesticated animals and decapitated heads (81.6%). They are typically located within viewing distance (on average 43 m) of ancient trails that crisscross the Nazca Pampa and were most likely built and viewed at the individual or small-group level. On the other hand, the giant line-type figurative geoglyphs mainly depict wild animals (64%). They are found an average of 34 m from the elaborate linear/trapezoidal network of geoglyphs, which suggests that they were probably built and used on a community level for ritual activities…(More)”
The Age of AI Nationalism and Its Effects
Paper by Susan Ariel Aaronson: “Policy makers in many countries are determined to develop artificial intelligence (AI) within their borders because they view AI as essential to both national security and economic growth. Some countries have proposed adopting AI sovereignty, where the nation develops AI for its people, by its people and within its borders. In this paper, the author makes a distinction between policies designed to advance domestic AI and policies that, with or without direct intent, hamper the production or trade of foreign-produced AI (known as “AI nationalism”). AI nationalist policies in one country can make it harder for firms in another country to develop AI. If officials can limit access to key components of the AI supply chain, such as data, capital, expertise or computing power, they may be able to limit the AI prowess of competitors in country Y and/or Z. Moreover, if policy makers can shape regulations in ways that benefit local AI competitors, they may also impede the competitiveness of other nations’ AI developers. AI nationalism may seem appropriate given the import of AI, but this paper aims to illuminate how AI nationalistic policies may backfire and could divide the world into AI haves and have nots…(More)”.