As part of the CITP Digital Investigators Conference, the public is invited to join us in person or virtually for this event. Please register here to attend in person. The livestream will be available here. Powerful new technologies like OpenAI’s “ChatGPT” or Google’s “Bard” have sparked excitement over the potential they have to transform how we work, learn and communicate for the better. But their potential harms also trigger fears and unease. As a result, the public discourse around such large language models (LLMs) can be noisy or chaotic. CITP has convened a panel of experts from the journalism, tech research and public policy sectors to discuss their experiences with – and approaches to – engaging with these emerging technologies in their respective professions. We will also talk about the responsibilities journalists and academics may have in shaping the public conversation around digital technologies, and how they can support each other’s work for the b
The proliferation of social media has given rise to widespread study and speculation about the impact of digital technologies on politics, activism, and social change. Key among these debates is the role of social media in shaping the contemporary public sphere, and by proxy, our democracy. Maligned by some as “slacktivism,” it will be argued that social media platforms such as Twitter created unique opportunities for traditionally excluded voices to challenge the terms of public debate. Using the evidence from Twitter hashtag networks such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, we will demonstrate how hashtag activism complemented other forms of activism and changed the terms of mainstream discussions about race and gender justice in the United States. We will also reflect on the continued capacity of social media for social change, in light of recent changes to Twitter and other platforms. This talk draws on research from #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, available
Register here to attend in person. In collaboration with the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Users who wish to exercise privacy rights or make privacy choices must often rely on website or app user interfaces. However, too often, these user interfaces suffer from usability deficiencies ranging from being difficult to find, hard to understand, or time-consuming to use, to being deceptive and dangerously misleading. This talk will discuss user-centric approaches to designing and evaluating privacy interfaces that better meet user needs and reduce the overwhelming number of privacy choices. A privacy choice mechanism evaluation framework will be presented and several examples of privacy interface design and evaluation from my research, including more usable cookie consent banners, mobile app privacy nutrition labels, IoT privacy and security labels, and a privacy options icon for the State of California. Bio: Lorrie Faith Cranor i
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) represents a major advance in artificial intelligence (AI) research. However, the widespread use of LLMs is also coupled with significant ethical and social challenges. Previous research has pointed towards auditing as a promising governance mechanism to help ensure that AI systems are designed and deployed in ways that are ethical, legal, and technically robust. However, existing auditing procedures fail to address the governance challenges posed by LLMs, which are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. To help bridge that gap, Mokander will present a novel blueprint for how to audit LLMs. By drawing on best practices from IT governance and system engineering, he and his collaborators at the University of Oxford propose a three-layered approach, whereby governance audits, model audits, and application audits complement and inform each other. Ultimately, this research seeks to expand the methodological toolkit available to technolog