In 2024, Computer Weekly’s data and ethics coverage continued to focus on the various ethical issues associated with the improvement and deployment of data-driven systems, peculiarly artificial intelligence (AI).
This included reports on the copyright issues associated with generative AI (GenAI) tools, the environmental impacts of AI, the invasive tracking tools in place across the internet, and the ways in which autonomous weapons undermine human moral agency.
Other stories focused on the wider social implications of data-driven technologies, including the ways they are utilized to inflict force on migrants, and how our usage of technology prefigures certain political or social outcomes.
In an analysis published 14 January 2024, the IMF examined the possible impact of AI on the global labour market, noting that while it has the possible to “jumpstart productivity, boost global growth and rise incomes around the world”, it could just as easy “replace jobs and deepen inequality”; and will “likely worsen overall inequality” if policymakers do not proactively work to prevent the technology from stoking social tensions.
The IMF said that, unlike labour income inequality, which can decrease in certain scenarios where AI’s displacing effect lowers everyone’s incomes, capital income and wealth inequality “always increase” with greater AI adoption, both nationally and globally.
“The main reason for the increase in capital income and wealth inequality is that AI leads to labour displacement and an increase in the request for AI capital, expanding capital returns and asset holdings’ value,” it said.
“Since in the model, as in the data, advanced income workers hold a large share of assets, they benefit more from the emergence in capital returns. As a result, in all scenarios, independent of the impact on labour income, the full income of top earners increases due to capital income gains.”
In January, GenAI company Anthropic claimed to a US court that utilizing copyrighted content in large language model (LLM) training data counts as “fair use”, and that “today’s general-purpose AI tools simply could not exist” if AI companies had to pay licences for the material.
Anthropic made the claim after, a host of music publishers including Concord, Universal Music Group and ABKCO initiated legal action against the Amazon- and Google-backed firm in October 2023, demanding possibly millions in damages for the allegedly “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics”.
However, in a submission to the US Copyright Office on 30 October (which was completely separate from the case), Anthropic said that the training of its AI model Claude “qualifies as a quintessentially lawful usage of materials”, arguing that, “to the degree copyrighted works are utilized in training data, it is for analysis (of statistical relationships between words and concepts) that is unrelated to any expressive intent of the work”.
On the possible of a licensing government for LLM’s ingestion of copyrighted content, Anthropic argued that always requiring licences would be inappropriate, as it would lock up access to the vast majority of works and benefit “only the most highly resourced entities” that are able to pay their way into compliance.
In a 40-page paper submitted to the court on 16 January 2024 (responding specifically to a “preliminary injunction request” filed by the music publishers), Anthropic took the same argument further, claiming “it would not be possible to amass adequate content to train an LLM like Claude in arm’s-length licensing transactions, at any price”.
It added that Anthropic is not alone in utilizing data “broadly assembled from the publically available internet”, and that “in practice, there is no another way to amass a training corpus with the scale and diversity essential to train a complex LLM with a broad knowing of human language and the planet in general”.
Anthropic further claimed that the scale of the datasets required to train LLMs is simply besides large to for an effective licensing government to operate: “One could not enter licensing transactions with adequate rights owners to cover the billions of texts essential to yield the trillions of tokens that general-purpose LLMs require for appropriate training. If licences were required to train LLMs on copyrighted content, today’s general-purpose AI tools simply could not exist.”
Computer Weekly spoke to members of the Migrants Rights Network (MRN) and Anti-Raids Network (ARN) about how the data sharing between public and private bodies for the purposes of carrying out immigration raids helps to prop up the UK’s hostile environment by instilling an atmosphere of fear and deterring migrants from accessing public services.
Published in the wake of the fresh Labour government announcing a “major surge in immigration enforcement and returns activity”, including increased detentions and deportations, a report by the MRN details how UK Immigration Enforcement uses data from the public, police, government departments, local authorities and others to facilitate raids.
Julia Tinsley-Kent, head of policy and communications at the MRN and 1 of the report’s authors, said the data sharing in place – coupled with government rhetoric about strong enforcement – fundamentally leads to people “self-policing due to the fact that they’re so frightened of all the ways that you can get tripped up” within the hostile environment.
She added this is peculiarly “insidious” in the context of data sharing from institutions that are supposedly there to aid people, specified as education or healthcare bodies.
As part of the hostile environment policies, the MRN, the ARN and others have long argued that the function of raids goes much deeper than specified social exclusion, and besides works to disrupt the lives of migrants, their families, businesses and communities, as well as to impose a form of panic that produces heightened fear, insecurity and isolation.
At the very end of April, military technology experts gathered in Vienna for a conference on the improvement and usage of autonomous weapons systems (AWS), where they warned about the detrimental intellectual effects of AI-powered weapons.
Specific concerns raised by experts throughout the conference included the possible for dehumanisation erstwhile people on the receiving end of lethal force are reduced to data points and numbers on a screen; the hazard of discrimination during mark selection due to biases in the programming or criteria used; as well as the emotional and intellectual detachment of operators from the human consequences of their actions.
Speakers besides touched on whether there can always be meaningful human control over AWS, due to the combination of automation bias and how specified weapons increase the velocity of warfare beyond human cognition.
The second global AI summit in Seoul, South Korea saw dozens of governments and companies double down on their commitments to safely and inclusively make the technology, but questions remained about who precisely is being included and which risks are given priority.
The attendees and experts Computer Weekly spoke with said while the summit ended with any concrete outcomes that can be taken forward before the AI Action Summit due to take place in France in early 2025, there are inactive a number of areas where further movement is urgently needed.
In particular, they stressed the request for mandatory AI safety commitments from companies; socio-technical evaluations of systems that take into account how they interact with people and institutions in real-world situations; and wider participation from the public, workers and others affected by AI-powered systems.
However, they besides said it is “early days yet” and highlighted the importance of the AI Safety Summit events in creating open dialog between countries and setting the foundation for catalysing future action.
Over the course of the two-day AI Seoul Summit, a number of agreements and pledges were signed by the governments and companies in attendance.
For governments, this includes the European Union (EU) and a group of 10 countries signing the Seoul Declaration, which builds on the Bletchley Deceleration signed six months ago by 28 governments and the EU at the UK’s inaugural AI Safety Summit. It besides includes the Seoul message of Intent Toward global Cooperation on AI Safety Science, which will see publically backed investigation institutes come together to guarantee “complementarity and interoperability” between their method work and general approaches to AI safety.
The Seoul Declaration in peculiar affirmed “the importance of active multi-stakeholder collaboration” in this area and committed the governments active to “actively” include a wide scope of stakeholders in AI-related discussions.
A larger group of more than 2 twelve governments besides committed to developing shared risk thresholds for frontier AI models to limit their harmful impacts in the Seoul Ministerial Statement, which highlighted the request for effective safeguards and interoperable AI safety investigating regimes between countries.
The agreements and pledges made by companies include 16 AI global firms signing the Frontier AI Safety Commitments, which is simply a circumstantial voluntary set of measures for how they will safely make the technology, and 14 firms signing the Seoul AI Business Pledge, which is simply a akin set of commitments made by a mixture of South Korean and global tech firms to approach AI improvement responsibly.
One of the key voluntary commitments made by the AI companies was not to make or deploy AI systems if the risks cannot be sufficiently mitigated. However, in the wake of the summit, a group of current and erstwhile workers from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind – the first 2 of which signed the safety commitments in Seoul – said these firms cannot be trusted to voluntarily share information about their systems capabilities and risks with governments or civilian society.
Dozens of university, charity and policing websites designed to aid people get support for serious issues specified as sexual abuse, addiction or intellectual wellness are inadvertently collecting and sharing site visitors’ delicate data with advertisers.
A variety of tracking tools embedded on these sites – including Meta Pixel and Google Analytics – mean that erstwhile a individual visits them seeking help, their delicate data is collected and shared with companies like Google and Meta, which may become aware that a individual is looking to usage support services before those services can even offer help.
According to privacy experts attempting to rise awareness of the issue, the usage of specified tracking tools means people’s information is being shared inadvertently with these advertisers, as shortly as they enter the sites in many cases due to the fact that analytics tags begin collecting individual data before users have interacted with the cookie banner.
Depending on the configuration of the analytics in place, the data collected could include information about the site visitor’s age, location, browser, device, operating strategy and behaviours online.
While even more data is shared with advertisers if users consent to cookies, experts told Computer Weekly the sites do not supply an adequate explanation of how their information will be stored and utilized by programmatic advertisers.
They further warned the issue is “endemic” due a widespread deficiency of awareness about how tracking technologies like cookies work, as well as the possible harms associated with allowing advertisers inadvertent access to specified delicate information.
Computer Weekly spoke to author and documentary manager Thomas Dekeyser about Clodo, a clandestine group of French IT workers who spent the early 1980s sabotaging technological infrastructure, which was utilized as the jumping off point for a wider conversation about the politics of techno-refusal.
Dekeyser says a major motivation for writing his upcoming book on the subject is that people refusing technology – whether that be the Luddites, Clodo or any another extremist formation – are “all besides frequently reduced to the figure of the primitivist, the romantic, or the individual who wants to go back in time, and it’s seen as a kind of anti-modernist position to take”.
Noting that ‘technophobe’ or ‘Luddite’ have long been utilized as pejorative insults for those who argue the usage and control of technology by narrow capitalist interests, Dekeyser outlined the diverse scope of historical subjects and their heterogenous motivations for refusal: “I want to push against these terms and what they imply.”
For Dekeyser, the past of technology is necessarily the past of its refusal. From the Ancient Greek inventor Archimedes – who Dekeyser says can be described as the first “machine breaker” due to his tendency to destruct his own inventions – to the early mercantilist states of Europe backing their guild members’ acts of sabotage against fresh labour devices, the social-technical nature of technology means it has always been a terrain of political struggle.
Hundreds of workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform were left incapable to work after mass account suspensions caused by a suspected glitch in the e-commerce giant’s payments system.
Beginning on 16 May 2024, a number of US-based Mechanical Turk workers began receiving account suspension forms from Amazon, locking them out of their accounts and preventing them from completing more work on the crowdsourcing platform.
Owned and operated by Amazon, Mechanical Turk allows businesses, or “requesters”, to outsource various processes to a “distributed workforce”, who then complete tasks virtually from wherever they are based in the world, including data annotation, surveys, content moderation and AI training.
According to those Computer Weekly spoke with, the suspensions were purportedly tied to issues with the workers’ Amazon Payment accounts, an online payments processing service that allows them to both receive wages and make purchases from Amazon. The issue affected hundreds of workers.
MTurk workers from advocacy organisation Turkopticon outlined how specified situations are an on-going issue that workers gotta deal with, and detailed Amazon’s mediocre track evidence on the issue.
Refugee lawyer and author Petra Molnar spoke to Computer Weekly about the extreme force people on the decision face at borders across the world, and how increasingly hostile anti-immigrant politics is being enabled and reinforced by a ‘lucrative panopticon’ of surveillance technologies.
She noted how – due to the vast array of surveillance technologies now deployed against people on the decision – full border-crossing regions have been transformed into literal graveyards, while people are resorting to burning off their fingertips to avoid invasive biometric surveillance; hiding in dangerous terrain to evade pushbacks or being placed in refugee camps with dire surviving conditions; and living homeless due to the fact that algorithms shielded from public scrutiny are refusing them immigration position in the countries they’ve sought safety in.
Molnar described how lethal border situations are enabled by a mixture of increasingly hostile anti-immigrant politics and sophisticated surveillance technologies, which combine to make a deadly feedback loop for those simply seeking a better life.
She besides discussed the “inherently racist and discriminatory” nature of borders, and how the technologies deployed in border spaces are highly difficult, if not impossible, to divorce from the underlying logic of exclusion that defines them.
The possible of AI to aid companies measurement and optimise their sustainability efforts could be outweighed by the immense environmental impacts of the technology itself.
On the affirmative side, speakers at the AI Summit London outlined, for example, how the data analysis capabilities of AI can assist companies with decarbonisation and another environmental initiatives by capturing, connecting and mapping presently disparate data sets; automatically pin point harmful emissions to circumstantial sites in supply chains; as well as foretell and manage the request and supply of energy in circumstantial areas.
They besides said it could aid companies better manage their Scope 3 emissions (which refers to indirect greenhouse gas emissions that happen outside of a company’s operations, but that are inactive a consequence of their activities) by linking up data sources and making them more legible.
However, despite the possible sustainability benefits of AI, speakers were clear that the technology itself is having immense environmental impacts around the world, and that AI itself will come to be a major part of many organisations Scope 3 emissions.
One talker noted that if the rate of AI usage continues on its current trajectory without any form of intervention, then half of the world’s full energy supply will be utilized on AI by 2040; while another pointed out that, at a time erstwhile billions of people are struggling with access to water, AI-providing companies are utilizing immense amounts of water to cool their datacentres.
They added AI in this context could aid build in circularity to the operation, and that it was besides key for people in the tech sector to “internalise” reasoning about the socio-economic and environmental impacts of AI, so that it is thought about from a much earlier phase in a system’s lifecycle.
