Declaration by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ): “We are at a crossroads. Despite the progress made in recent years, we need renewed commitment andvengagement to advance toward and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), can play a significant role in this regard. AI presents opportunities and risks in a world of rapid social, political, economic, ecological, and technological shifts. If developed and deployed responsibly, AI can drive sustainable development and benefit society, the economy, and the planet. Yet, without safeguards throughout the AI value chain, it may widen inequalities within and between countries and contribute to direct harm through inappropriate, illegal, or deliberate misuse. It can also contribute to human rights violations, fuel disinformation, homogenize creative and cultural expression, and harm the environment. These risks are likely to disproportionately affect low-income countries, vulnerable groups, and future generations. Geopolitical competition and market dependencies further amplify these risks…(More)”.
Children’s Voice Privacy: First Steps And Emerging Challenges
Paper by Ajinkya Kulkarni, et al: “Children are one of the most under-represented groups in speech technologies, as well as one of the most vulnerable in terms of privacy. Despite this, anonymization techniques targeting this population have received little attention. In this study, we seek to bridge this gap, and establish a baseline for the use of voice anonymization techniques designed for adult speech when applied to children’s voices. Such an evaluation is essential, as children’s speech presents a distinct set of challenges when compared to that of adults. This study comprises three children’s datasets, six anonymization methods, and objective and subjective utility metrics for evaluation. Our results show that existing systems for adults are still able to protect children’s voice privacy, but suffer from much higher utility degradation. In addition, our subjective study displays the challenges of automatic evaluation methods for speech quality in children’s speech, highlighting the need for further research…(More)”. See also: Responsible Data for Children.
Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough
Blog by Seemay Chou: “In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make the case that the biggest barriers to progress today are institutional. They’re not because of physical limitations or intellectual scarcity. They’re the product of legacy systems — systems that were built with one logic in mind, but now operate under another. And until we go back and address them at the root, we won’t get the future we say we want.
I’m a scientist. Over the past five years, I’ve experimented with science outside traditional institutes. From this vantage point, one truth has become inescapable. The journal publishing system — the core of how science is currently shared, evaluated, and rewarded — is fundamentally broken. And I believe it’s one of the legacy systems that prevents science from meeting its true potential for society.
It’s an unpopular moment to critique the scientific enterprise given all the volatility around its funding. But we do have a public trust problem. The best way to increase trust and protect science’s future is for scientists to have the hard conversations about what needs improvement. And to do this transparently. In all my discussions with scientists across every sector, exactly zero think the journal system works well. Yet we all feel trapped in a system that is, by definition, us.
I no longer believe that incremental fixes are enough. Science publishing must be built anew. I help oversee billions of dollars in funding across several science and technology organizations. We are expanding our requirement that all scientific work we fund will not go towards traditional journal publications. Instead, research we support should be released and reviewed more openly, comprehensively, and frequently than the status quo.
This policy is already in effect at Arcadia Science and Astera Institute, and we’re actively funding efforts to build journal alternatives through both Astera and The Navigation Fund. We hope others cross this line with us, and below I explain why every scientist and science funder should strongly consider it…(More)”.
Silicon Valley Is at an Inflection Point
Article by Karen Hao: “…In the decade that I have observed Silicon Valley — first as an engineer, then as a journalist — I’ve watched the industry shift to a new paradigm. Tech companies have long reaped the benefits of a friendly U.S. government, but the Trump administration has made clear that it will now grant new firepower to the industry’s ambitions. The Stargate announcement was just one signal. Another was the Republican tax bill that the House passed last week, which would prohibit states from regulating A.I. for the next 10 years.
The leading A.I. giants are no longer merely multinational corporations; they are growing into modern-day empires. With the full support of the federal government, soon they will be able to reshape most spheres of society as they please, from the political to the economic to the production of science…(More)”.
Surveillance pricing: How your data determines what you pay
Article by Douglas Crawford: “Surveillance pricing, also known as personalized or algorithmic pricing, is a practice where companies use your personal data, such as your location, the device you’re using, your browsing history, and even your income, to determine what price to show you. It’s not just about supply and demand — it’s about you as a consumer and how much the system thinks you’re able (or willing) to pay.
Have you ever shopped online for a flight(new window), only to find that the price mysteriously increased the second time you checked? Or have you and a friend searched for the same hotel room on your phones, only to find your friend sees a lower price? This isn’t a glitch — it’s surveillance pricing at work.
In the United States, surveillance pricing is becoming increasingly prevalent across various industries, including airlines, hotels, and e-commerce platforms. It exists elsewhere, but in other parts of the world, such as the European Union, there is a growing recognition of the danger this pricing model presents to citizens’ privacy, resulting in stricter data protection laws aimed at curbing it. The US appears to be moving in the opposite direction…(More)”.
Collective Bargaining in the Information Economy Can Address AI-Driven Power Concentration
Position paper by Nicholas Vincent, Matthew Prewitt and Hanlin Li: “…argues that there is an urgent need to restructure markets for the information that goes into AI systems. Specifically, producers of information goods (such as journalists, researchers, and creative professionals) need to be able to collectively bargain with AI product builders in order to receive reasonable terms and a sustainable return on the informational value they contribute. We argue that without increased market coordination or collective bargaining on the side of these primary information producers, AI will exacerbate a large-scale “information market failure” that will lead not only to undesirable concentration of capital, but also to a potential “ecological collapse” in the informational commons. On the other hand, collective bargaining in the information economy can create market frictions and aligned incentives necessary for a pro-social, sustainable AI future. We provide concrete actions that can be taken to support a coalitionbased approach to achieve this goal. For example, researchers and developers can establish technical mechanisms such as federated data management tools and explainable data value estimations, to inform and facilitate collective bargaining in the information economy. Additionally, regulatory and policy interventions may be introduced to support trusted data intermediary organizations representing guilds or syndicates of information producers…(More)”.
Human rights centered global governance of quantum technologies: advancing information for all
UNESCO Brief: “The integration of quantum technologies into AI systems introduces greater complexity, requiring stronger policy and technical frameworks that uphold human rights protections. Ensuring that these advancements do not widen existing inequalities or cause environmental harm is crucial.
The Brief expands on the “Quantum technologies and their global impact: discussion paper ”published by UNESCO. The objective of this Brief is to unpack the multiple dimensions of the quantum ecosystem and broadly explore the human rights and policy implications of quantum technologies, with some key findings:
- While quantum technologies promise advancements of human rights in the areas of encryption, privacy, and security, they also pose risks to these very domains and related ones such as freedom of expression and access to information
- Quantum innovations will reshape security, economic growth, and science, but without a robust human rights-based framework, they risk deepening inequalities and destabilizing global governance.
- The quantum divide is emerging as a critical issue, with disparities in access to technology, expertise, and infrastructure widening global inequalities. Unchecked, this gap could limit the benefits of quantum advancements for all.
- The quantum gender divide remains stark—79% of quantum companies have no female senior leaders, and only 1 in 54 quantum job applicants are women.
The Issue Brief provides broad recommendations and targeted actions for stakeholders,emphasizing
human rights-centered governance, awareness, capacity building, and inclusivity to bridge global and gender divides. The key recommendations focus on a comprehensive governance model which must ensure a multistakeholder approach that facilitates, state duties, corporate accountability, effective remedies for human rights violations, and open standards for equitable access. Prioritizing human rights in global governance will ensure quantum innovation serves all of humanity while safeguarding fundamental freedoms…(More)”.
Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves
Article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: “I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google.
Ordinary search has gone to the dogs. Maybe as Google goes gaga for AI, its search engine will get better again, but I doubt it. In just the last few months, I’ve noticed that AI-enabled search, too, has been getting crappier.
In particular, I’m finding that when I search for hard data such as market-share statistics or other business numbers, the results often come from bad sources. Instead of stats from 10-Ks, the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) mandated annual business financial reports for public companies, I get numbers from sites purporting to be summaries of business reports. These bear some resemblance to reality, but they’re never quite right. If I specify I want only 10-K results, it works. If I just ask for financial results, the answers get… interesting,
This isn’t just Perplexity. I’ve done the exact same searches on all the major AI search bots, and they all give me “questionable” results.
Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Formally, in AI circles, this is known as AI model collapse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and “irreversible defects” in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, “The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality.”
Model collapse is the result of three different factors. The first is error accumulation, in which each model generation inherits and amplifies flaws from previous versions, causing outputs to drift from original data patterns. Next, there is the loss of tail data: In this, rare events are erased from training data, and eventually, entire concepts are blurred. Finally, feedback loops reinforce narrow patterns, creating repetitive text or biased recommendations…(More)”.
Project Push creates an archive of news alerts from around the world
Article by Neel Dhanesha: “A little over a year ago, Matt Taylor began to feel like he was getting a few too many push notifications from the BBC News app.
It’s a feeling many of us can probably relate to. Many people, myself included, have turned off news notifications entirely in the past few months. Taylor, however, went in the opposite direction.
Instead of turning off notifications, he decided to see how the BBC — the most popular news app in the U.K., where Taylor lives — compared to other news organizations around the world. So he dug out an old Google Pixel phone, downloaded 61 news apps onto it, and signed up for push notifications on all of them.
As notifications roll in, a custom-built script (made with the help of ChatGPT) uploads their text to a server and a Bluesky page, providing a near real-time view of push notifications from services around the world. Taylor calls it Project Push.
People who work in news “take the front page very seriously,” said Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times who built Project Push in his spare time. “There are lots of editors who care a lot about that, but actually one of the most important people in the newsroom is the person who decides that they’re going to press a button that sends an immediate notification to millions of people’s phones.”
The Project Push feed is a fascinating portrait of the news today. There are the expected alerts — breaking news, updates to ongoing stories like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the latest shenanigans in Washington — but also:
— Updates on infrastructure plans that, without the context, become absolutely baffling (a train will instead be a bus?).
— Naked attempts to increase engagement.
— Culture updates that some may argue aren’t deserving of a push alert from the Associated Press.
— Whatever this is.
Taylor tells me he’s noticed some geographic differences in how news outlets approach push notifications. Publishers based in Asia and the Middle East, for example, send far more notifications than European or American ones; CNN Indonesia alone pushed about 17,000 of the 160,000 or so notifications Project Push has logged over the past year…(More)”.
Digital Democracy in a Divided Global Landscape
10 essays by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “A first set of essays analyzes how local actors are navigating the new tech landscape. Lillian Nalwoga explores the challenges and upsides of Starlink satellite internet deployment in Africa, highlighting legal hurdles, security risks, and concerns about the platform’s leadership. As African nations look to Starlink as a valuable tool in closing the digital divide, Nalwoga emphasizes the need to invest in strong regulatory frameworks to safeguard digital spaces. Jonathan Corpus Ong and Dean Jackson analyze the landscape of counter-disinformation funding in local contexts. They argue that there is a “mismatch” between the priorities of funders and the strategies that activists would like to pursue, resulting in “ineffective and extractive workflows.” Ong and Jackson isolate several avenues for structural change, including developing “big tent” coalitions of activists and strategies for localizing aid projects. Janjira Sombatpoonsiri examines the role of local actors in foreign influence operations in Southeast Asia. She highlights three motivating factors that drive local participation in these operations: financial benefits, the potential to gain an edge in domestic power struggles, and the appeal of anti-Western narratives.
A second set of essays explores evolving applications of digital repression…
A third set focuses on national strategies and digital sovereignty debates…
A fourth set explores pressing tech policy and regulatory questions…(More)”.