AI, Governance and Trust in Digital Societies

Event hosted by the Discipline of Media and Communications

This event has now concluded.

Wednesday 27th September, 2023

9am to 4:30pm

Lecture Theatre 200, Social Sciences Building (A02)

Science Road, The University of Sydney
NSW 2006 

 

This will be a hybrid in person/streamed event. 

 

 

 

As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly reshapes social relations, labour and work, media and creative industries, and education, Australians face critical questions that include:

• How can AI systems enhance human creativity, equity, and innovation?
• What are the implications of AI for education, services, news and entertainment?
• What are the legal and ethical risks of generative AI to social trust and democratic governance?

The AI, Governance and Trust in Digital Societies event explores these questions with a keynote addresses from Professor Kate Crawford, USC Annenberg and Australian Human Rights Commissioner Ms Lorraine Finlay, as well as presentations and conversations with leading academics in media, law, and education.

 

Opening Keynote Address

Atlas of AI (2021) author Professor Kate Crawford (USC Annenberg)

Ground Truth & Generative AI

We are living in a period of rapid acceleration for generative AI, where large language and text-to-image diffusion models are being deployed in a multitude of everyday contexts. From ChatGPT’s training set of hundreds of billions of words to LAION-5B’s corpus of almost 6 billion image-text pairs, these vast datasets – scraped from the internet and treated as “ground truth” – play a critical role in shaping the epistemic boundaries that govern machine learning models. Yet training data is beset with complex social, political, and epistemological challenges. What happens when data is stripped of context, meaning, and provenance? How does training data limit what and how machine learning systems interpret the world? And most importantly, what forms of power do these approaches enhance and enable? This lecture is an invitation to reflect on the epistemic foundations of generative AI, and to consider the wide-ranging impacts of the current generative turn.

 

Professor Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence. She is a Research Professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR in New York, an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.  Her latest book,  Atlas of AI (Yale, 2021) won the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, the ASSI&T Best Information Science Book Award, and was named one of the best books in 2021 by New Scientist and the Financial Times. Over her twenty-year research career, she has also produced groundbreaking creative collaborations and visual investigations. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the V&A in London, and was awarded with the Design of the Year Award in 2019 and included in the Design of the Decades by the Design Museum of London. Her collaboration with the artist Trevor Paglen, Excavating AI, won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. She has advised policy makers in the United Nations, the White House, and the European Parliament, and she currently leads the Knowing Machines Project, an international research collaboration that investigates the foundations of machine learning.

 

Keynote Address

Commissioner Lorraine Finlay 
(Australian Human Rights Commission)

Why Ethical AI should Promote Human Rights

AI promises to improve efficiency and deliver expeditious outcomes. However when AI is integrated into government decision making without safeguards, there can be adverse outcomes for all Australians. Listen to Human Rights Commissioner, Lorraine Finlay, speak on ethical AI and why it should aim to protect and promote human rights.

 

Ms Lorraine Finlay is the Human Rights Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission, commencing in this position in November 2021. In this role Lorraine has particular responsibility for protecting and promoting fundamental rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech, religion, movement and association. She also leads the work of the Commission in areas including business & human rights, modern slavery, asylum seekers and refugees, and technology & human rights.

Prior to joining the Commission, Lorraine has worked as a lawyer and academic specializing in human rights and public law. Her past roles have included working as the Senior Human Trafficking Specialist with the Australian Mission to ASEAN, an academic at Murdoch University, and a State Prosecutor with the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (WA). Lorraine holds a dual Masters in Law from New York University and the National University of Singapore, where she studied as a Singapura Scholar. She has also been actively involved in a variety of community organisations, including past Board roles with the Ishar Multicultural Women’s Health Service and National Council of Women (WA).

 

 

Registrations have now closed.

Please contact cdts.enquiries@sydney.edu.au if you have any questions about this event.