"Given the current state of play, what we’re concerned about is how little we actually know about how these AI tools work and what their long-term impact will be to citizens, especially as governments have access to troves of sensitive personal data in order to further develop and fine tune the technology. How are government AI models storing and processing data about public servants, citizens and/or residents of a country, whether in experimental sandboxes or beyond?

There are merits to streamlining tedious administrative tasks, but there are still big questions that must be answered around data privacy, transparency and automated decision-making if the government is about to promote and embed wide-spread agentic AI use for civil services.

On the data privacy front, several questions arise:

- How will personal data, including sensitive data, be processed and used by the AI tools deployed? What data protection safeguards will be in place to prevent data leakage?
- When involving third-party vendours, what are the contractual safeguards governments and AI companies have around data processing arrangements?
- What are the data protection safeguards governing fine-tuning?

Data protection in the govAI context is especially important when we consider how highly sensitive, and sometimes secret, government data might be that could end up being processed by a black box algorithm - e.g., where an employee or colleague lives, any confidential documents that appear in meeting notes, etc."

https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5767/big-oil-big-algorithm-public-money-private-models

#AI #BigTech #GenerativeAI #Privacy #DataProtection #Algorithms #BlackBoxes

We traded blogs for black boxes, now we're paying for it

https://tekhne.dev/internet-resist/

#HackerNews #We #traded #blogs #for #black #boxes #now #paying #for #it

blogs #blackboxes #techculture #internetfreedom #digitalcommunication

#Chinese Robotaxis Have Government #BlackBoxes, Approach US Quality - Slashdot
#China #privacy #blackbox #surveillance

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/2327229/chinese-robotaxis-have-government-black-boxes-approach-us-quality?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

"On Facebook and Reddit, workers compared notes. Previously, they’d known what to expect from their pay because Shipt had a formula: It gave workers a base pay of $5 per delivery plus 7.5 percent of the total amount of the customer’s order through the app. That formula allowed workers to look at order amounts and choose jobs that were worth their time. But Shipt had changed the payment rules without alerting workers. When the company finally issued a press release about the change, it revealed only that the new pay algorithm paid workers based on “effort,” which included factors like the order amount, the estimated amount of time required for shopping, and the mileage driven.

The company claimed this new approach was fairer to workers and that it better matched the pay to the labor required for an order. Many workers, however, just saw their paychecks dwindling. And since Shipt didn’t release detailed information about the algorithm, it was essentially a black box that the workers couldn’t see inside.

The workers could have quietly accepted their fate, or sought employment elsewhere. Instead, they banded together, gathering data and forming partnerships with researchers and organizations to help them make sense of their pay data. I’m a data scientist; I was drawn into the campaign in the summer of 2020, and I proceeded to build an SMS-based tool—the Shopper Transparency Calculator—to collect and analyze the data. With the help of that tool, the organized workers and their supporters essentially audited the algorithm and found that it had given 40 percent of workers substantial pay cuts. The workers showed that it’s possible to fight back against the opaque authority of algorithms, creating transparency despite a corporation’s wishes."

https://spectrum.ieee.org/shipt

#GigWorkers #Shipt #USA #Algorithms #BlackBoxes

Ever heard of #appleyspaghettis, #chesttoast, #magicsandwich, #gamingthesystem or #blackboxes?! WE DID!

Experts in AI, global and digital health came together for a 2-day workshop to learn about how to leverage #AI for the design and implementation of health decision support systems with focus on low resource settings.

A collaboration with the Light Intelligent Global Health Technologies [LiGHT] EPFL and Yale University, the World Health Organization and the Digital Health Unit SwissTPH.

Interview of #CynthiaRudin about #InterpretableML. She is advocating #interpretable models for high-stake #decisions, which merit the extra training effort. Those #whiteboxes (or should we say #lightboxes?) give us hope in times where business leaders feel tempted to surrender to obscure #darkboxes (sounds more adequate than #blackboxes, doesn’t it?), which escape #accountability and #adjustability!

“Cynthia Rudin Builds AI That Humans Can Understand” | Quanta Magazine

https://flip.it/pmlCdg

It's time to Open The Black Boxes

"OPEN CALL_IN THE ERA OF WAR"

One Word

Would you like to participate?

Una parola

Vuoi partecipare anche tu?

https://opentheblackboxes.org/opencalls/open-call_in-the-era-of-war/

#openTheBlackBoxes #blackBoxes #global #art #GlobalArt #war #openCall #arte #globale #eraDiGuerra #guerra #eraOfWar #scatolaNera

Had a lovely catch up with some fellow radical tech people and for various reasons, conversation got onto the topic of alternative (ie non-code based) epistemologies of Machine Learning. Especially thinking how to help UX and service designers able to analyse this stuff without feeling they have to become coders (or even architects, much as it hurts to say it).

Would the tootspace have any recommendations in this area to read?

#ML #MachineLearning #UX #UXandML #BlackBoxes