DEV Community: Leonardo Zamudio López

UNESCO Member States adopt first global agreement on the ethics of artificial intelligence

Leonardo Zamudio López — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 15:00:31 +0000

Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, presented on Thursday the first global standard on the ethics of artificial intelligence, adopted by UNESCO Member States at the General Conference.

This landmark text establishes common values and principles that will guide the construction of the legal infrastructure needed to ensure the healthy development of AI.

AI is ubiquitous, enabling many of our daily routines, from booking a flight, to driving driverless cars, to personalizing our morning news. AI also supports decision making by governments and the private sector.

AI technologies are delivering remarkable results in highly specialized fields, such as cancer detection and building inclusive environments for people with disabilities. It can also help combat global problems such as climate change and world hunger and reduce poverty by optimizing economic aid.

But technology is also bringing unprecedented new challenges. We are witnessing a rise in gender and ethnic bias, significant threats to privacy, dignity and agency, the dangers of mass surveillance, and the increased use of unreliable AI technologies in law enforcement, to name a few. Until now, there were no universal standards that provided answers to these problems.

In 2018, Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, launched an ambitious project: to give the world an ethical framework for the use of artificial intelligence. Three years later, thanks to the mobilization of hundreds of experts from around the world and intense international negotiations, UNESCO's 193 Member States have just officially adopted this ethical framework.

"The world needs rules for artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. The Recommendation on the Ethics of AI is an important response. It establishes the first global normative framework, while giving States the responsibility to implement it at their level. UNESCO will support its 193 Member States in its implementation and will ask them to report regularly on their progress and practices." -Audrey Azoulay

The content of the recommendation

The Recommendation aims to realize the benefits that AI brings to society and reduce the risks associated with it. It ensures that digital transformations promote human rights and contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, addressing issues of transparency, accountability and privacy, with action-oriented policy chapters on data governance, education, culture, labor, healthcare and the economy.

1. Data protection

The Recommendation calls for action beyond what technology companies and governments are doing to guarantee individuals greater protection by ensuring transparency, the ability to act and control over their personal data. It states that all individuals should be able to access or even delete their personal data records. It also includes actions to improve data protection and the individual's knowledge and right to control their own data. It also increases the ability of regulators around the world to enforce it.

2. Prohibition of social bookmarking and mass surveillance

The Recommendation explicitly prohibits the use of AI systems for social rating and mass surveillance. Such technologies are highly invasive, violate human rights and fundamental freedoms and are widely used. The Recommendation stresses that, when developing regulatory frameworks, Member States should bear in mind that ultimate responsibility and accountability should always rest with human beings and that AI technologies should not be given legal personality for their own sake.

3. Assist in monitoring and evaluating

The Recommendation also lays the groundwork for tools that will assist in its implementation. The Ethical Impact Assessment is intended to help countries and companies developing and deploying AI systems to assess the impact of those systems on people, society and the environment. The readiness assessment methodology helps Member States assess their readiness in terms of legal and technical infrastructure. This tool will help to improve the institutional capacity of countries and to recommend appropriate measures to be taken to ensure the implementation of ethics in practice. In addition, the Recommendation encourages Member States to consider adding the role of an independent AI ethics officer or some other mechanism to oversee ongoing auditing and monitoring efforts.

4. Environmental protection

The Recommendation stresses that AI actors should favor data-, energy- and resource-efficient AI methods that help ensure that AI becomes a more prominent tool in combating climate change and addressing environmental issues. The Recommendation calls on governments to assess the direct and indirect environmental impact throughout the lifecycle of the AI system. This includes its carbon footprint, energy consumption and the environmental impact of extracting raw materials to support the manufacture of AI technologies. It also aims to reduce the environmental impact of AI systems and data infrastructures. It incentivizes governments to invest in green technology, and if there is a disproportionate negative impact of AI systems on the environment, the Recommendation instructs that they not be used.

"Decisions that affect millions of people must be fair, transparent and accountable. These new technologies must help us address the major challenges of our world today, such as growing inequalities and the environmental crisis, not deepen them." - Gabriela Ramos

Emerging technologies such as AI have demonstrated their immense capacity to do good. However, their negative impacts, which are exacerbating an already divided and unequal world, must be controlled. AI developments must respect the rule of law, prevent harm and ensure that, when harm does occur, accountability and redress mechanisms are available to those affected.

YouTube removes dislikes count - good decision to end hate?

Leonardo Zamudio López — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 20:31:12 +0000

YouTube is testing changes in its platform that could affect one of the most classic indicators about the temperature of a video: dislikes. From their Twitter account they explained that these are some new design changes in which the amount of dislikes on videos will not be shown, but curiously the button will remain there.

At the moment, YouTube says that this will be a "small experiment" that some users may see during the next few weeks. However, creators will still be able to see the exact number of 'likes' and 'dislikes' from YouTube Studio.

YouTube

@youtube

👍👎 In response to creator feedback around well-being and targeted dislike campaigns, we're testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count. If you're part of this small experiment, you might spot one of these designs in the coming weeks (example below!).

17:00 PM - 30 Mar 2021

The equivalent of "review bombing" on YouTube, these are campaigns where users go en masse to click the 'dislike' button on a video. YouTube says it has implemented this change after talking to creators who have been victims of such campaigns.

However, if we look at the responses to the same YouTube tweet, the experiment doesn't seem to have been too well received. On Google's support website, YouTube explains in more detail that they have heard from creators that "public dislikes counters can affect their personal well-being", but some find it ironic that if it is for the well-being of creators they are now the only ones who can see the number of 'dislikes'.

It is also not easy to obviate that the video with the most 'dislikes' in history is a video from YouTube itself. The infamous YouTube Rewind of 2018 with more than 19 million 'dislikes', a video so hated by the community, that in 2019 YouTube decided to completely change the format, and yet users gave them back more 9 million 'dislikes'. In 2020, YouTube gave up and canceled the 'Rewind', claiming that "it was a different year".

YouTube says it does not plan to remove the button as such, and that using it will continue to work to "give feedback" to creators, or to fine-tune the video recommendations you receive on the platform. Those interested in providing feedback on these changes can do so through YouTube's help page.

My opinion

I consider this measure being taken by YouTube to be the most absurd measure that can be taken. Lemme explain why:

YouTube has policies regarding not posting videos with sensitive content, including hate speech. But, not all responsibility lies with the content creators, the YouTube community can also generate hate. And this is where the so-called "haters" come in. It is well known by most (if not all) people who use YouTube that these types of people exist. Those who for wanting to get attention or for wanting to be funny, are impregnating toxicity to any video that is shown to them. Let's talk about one of its main tools: THE COMMENTS.

I do not consider that removing the number of dislikes will help to end the hate on the platform, since in many videos there are a lot of hate comments, comments that YouTube does not regulate.

YouTube says that removing the dislikes count will help the public image of content creators not to be affected, however, this itself is much more exposed with comments.

The platform's comments allow us to write anything. From inserting a link to a pornographic site to attacking the public image of the content creator through slander.

And I think the latter is what YouTube needs to mitigate. Hateful comments can be very harsh, both to a group of people, and to the creator himself. It is well known that words on the internet can hurt just as much or worse than words in real life. There are cases of content creators whose careers were ruined by hateful comments, and even cases of suicide because of them.

If YouTube really wants to eliminate hate, it should start implementing better policies on hate comments because, as they would say in my country: You do as you please, but what about the children?

Anyways, I hope YouTube realizes the mistakes they are making, because, just as they complain to the community, the community now complains to them, and it is their duty to listen to the community if YouTube wants to remain a platform.

If you liked it, don't forget to share it with your friends. Let me know your opinion in the comments, remember to debate with logical reasoning and respect. Take care and see you next time.

Internet cookie warnings: An ineffective and inefficient way to enforce laws.

Leonardo Zamudio López — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 01:32:28 +0000

Written by Leonardo Zamudio López

Introduction

One of the most well-known aspects of the web are the famous "cookies", those old friends who are responsible for tracking our information on the Internet for advertising purposes.

It is well known, and has even become a meme, the fact that every time we enter a website, that well-known alert appears saying "We use cookies for a better user experience and recommendations".

But before we talk about the whole moral and ethical side of cookies, we must first know what they are.

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a packet of data that a web browser automatically stores on a user's computer when the user visits a website. The cookie is sent from the server to the visitor of the web page. Subsequently, each time the user visits the same web page or another web page of the same domain, the cookie will be read by the web browser, without being modified, and sent back to the web server.

Therefore, a cookie is just data that is stored on the user's computer. But since the storage is done at the behest of the web server, there has always been a fear that something malicious could be done. However, cookies are not software, nor are they code snippets, they are simply data. Therefore, in principle, cookies cannot transmit and execute viruses or install malware such as Trojans or spyware.

However, cookies can be used to track user activity on the Web.

Cookies were developed in 1994 by engineers at the Netscape company, and their browser, now defunct, was the first to accept them. Since then, cookies have been an essential element for the Web to function as we know it today.

As a curiosity, the original Netscape cookie specification can still be found on the Web today.

Cookies are necessary because the HTTP protocol used on the Web to transmit Web pages is a stateless protocol, and does not provide a mechanism for maintaining state, i.e., the history of requests and actions performed by a user between different requests.

Cookies were originally developed by Netscape to provide a reliable means of implementing a virtual shopping cart.

A virtual shopping cart, also called a virtual shopping basket, acts as a virtual device in which the user places the items he or she wishes to purchase, so that users can browse the site displaying the items for sale and add or remove them from the shopping basket at any time. Subsequently, cookies have been used for different purposes. The main one is to be able to differentiate users from each other in order to act differently depending on the user visiting a web page.

For example, cookies are used to store user preferences such as the preferred language for viewing a website.

Another example, most search engines such as bing have a preferences option. bing displays 10 results by default when performing a search. However, from the preferences page you can change this value to 50, for example. From then on, the results will always appear paged 50 by 50, even if the browser is closed, since the cookie is maintained from one day to the next.

But the main use of cookies is to store the session. The session is a basic concept in web applications that allows you to control user access to certain parts of a website and show you information particular to that user. Finally, there are also some problematic uses of cookies, such as tracking cookies, which allow a user to be tracked between different websites.

Tracking allows to know which websites a user has visited, how long he/she has been on each of them, and is usually used to create anonymous user profiles that can be used later for different purposes, such as the creation of advertising campaigns based on user profiles. This use of cookies is employed by companies that manage ads on the Internet, such as DoubleClick, one of the most important in the sector.

What do I think about cookies?

I certainly don't think it's a bad thing for a website to use cookies to store session information or any other type of data that helps the site's performance. However, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding cookies, mainly for advertising purposes.

We can take some responsibility away from social networks or forums, since they warn you about the use of cookies explicitly in the Terms and Conditions that absolutely no one reads when creating an account on these sites. However, what can we say about other sites?

I remember being on the computer searching for information for my school research assignments. Many of the pages I consulted were of a commercial nature. Every time I entered one of these sites, I would see the typical banner at the bottom: "We use cookies to improve the user experience". And I remember thinking to myself, "Ok, at least I, a programming student, know what cookies do. But what about a person who doesn't belong to an IT branch?"

Let's put this hypothetical situation: Let's go out on the street and ask random people "What is a cookie?". Most (if not all) people will answer you the following, "A cookie is a small-sized, sweet or savory, baked dessert usually made from wheat flour, eggs, sugar and butter."

And this is where the problem lies. User data is being used for advertising purposes without the user's explicit knowledge. And the worst part of the case is not that, many sites do not explicitly tell you what data they are using and for what purposes.

How can a user be 100% sure that their data is being used properly? Many sites still lack data use transparency protocols.

I believe that the best way for a user to be aware of the data being used is to say this explicitly. For example, instead of saying for the umpteenth time "We use cookies to improve the user experience", we could say: "We use data such as pages visited, location, device type (etc, etc, etc, etc), for performance, session and advertising purposes".

If we do not explicitly state the data used, how can we ensure that our data are used within our preferences and even within the legal framework?

And it is up to us, users, to inform ourselves about technological issues involving our personal data and our digital footprint. We must ensure that our data is being used appropriately. And if not, we can rise up in virtual arms and sing that glorious war cry, "Feed me your kings and queens, I will spit their bloody crowns to the ground."

Anyways, that's it for this post. Let me know what you think in the comments. Remember to always give your opinion based on logical reasoning and respect. Take care. See you next time.