In February, we collaborated with the Centre for Technomoral Futures on their latest event, What’s the Story with AI? Exploring AI Narratives and Counter-Narratives. The full recording is now available to watch online.

During this fireside chat, experts from academia and industry shared critical insights into the dominant narratives shaping public understanding of AI, and what alternative stories can be and are being told about AI and its place in our futures.

The event was chaired by Dr Alex Taylor (BRAID Fellow, University of Edinburgh), and featured speakers Dr Abeba Birhane (Trinity College Dublin), John Thornhill (Financial Times), and Steph Wright (Our AI Collective).

Watch now.

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The Fellowship will be working with and alongside policymakers and AI researchers/engineers to shape the Government’s approach to AI safety.

The overall goal of the research, across a broad range of topics, is to equip the government with an empirical understanding of the safety of advanced AI systems and their impacts on people and society.

The Fellow working with AISI will conduct research on topics such as:

• Monitoring the fast-moving landscape of AI development
• Evaluating the risks AI poses to national security and public welfare
• Advancing the field of systemic safety to improve societal resilience

This Innovation Fellowship is part of a unique strategic partnership between the British Academy and BRAID, supported by funding from the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) and the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The post Government’s approach to AI safety appeared first on BRAID UK.

The event marked the final month of Stills’ exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository – the final iteration of the artist’s Variations series, commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks fellowship. Students from Edinburgh College of Art took part in a pre-event workshop facilitated by Edinburgh-based visual artist Ot Pascoe to explore the exhibition’s archives before creating gowns and objects to adorn the funeral procession, led by Felicity Hammond, through the city for the wake. 

Upon arrival at the wake, the procession moved through the venue as Felicity Hammond’s updated service report was read aloud, accompanied by SAIéance, a live performance by Jules Rawlinson exploring machine learning as both media and spiritualist medium. Through an improvised engagement with feedback networks and neural style-transfer audio processing using freely available vocal models, uncanny voices were summoned from the ‘ghosts in the machine’.

Following the reading of the service report and the laying down of physical tributes, celebrant Nicola Osborne, Creative Industries Lead at BRAID, invited participants to take refreshments and connect with one another before coming together to reflect on AI in all its complexity. The wake continued with a discussion between Felicity Hammond and Alex Taylor reflecting upon AI life, ‘death’, and legacy (drawing on Alex’s BRAID fellowship research), before invited eulogists Julie Galante and Jen McGregor, reflected on their experiences with AI.

Throughout the event, attendees were invited to reflect on their own experiences of AI and to write personal eulogies using the materials provided. These reflections were shared in a variety of ways, including spoken aloud or displayed on a wall of remembrances. The evening ended with the sharing of participant eulogies, including invited contributions and reflections offered on the night. 

This event was created as a collaboration between Stills, Photoworks, BRAID and Inspace and conceived as a playful yet thought-provoking way to encourage people to reflect on AI and what it means to us all. We’ve published some of the eulogies to reflect the range of responses shared and to invite further consideration of how we imagine a future with AI in our everyday lives.

All photos: Chris Scott

Futher resources

Browse photos from the event here 
Find out more through this report from Al Jazeera
Download the order of service 
Read more about Felicity Hammond’s Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship here and her Stills exhibition here 

In Loving, Complicated Memory of Artificial Intelligence by Nicola Osborne, Creative Industries Lead, BRAID.  

 

 

Welcome to Inspace and to this END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE

My name is Nicola Osborne, and I will be your non-religious celebrant today through this wake, marking the passing of Artificial Intelligence, known to most of us simply as AI. 

I wanted to start by giving my sincere thanks to Felicity Hammond for reading her System Report accompanied by Jules Rawlinson and his work, SAIéance which explores machine learning as media and spiritualist medium.  

Now, some may rudely accuse us of having made up the death of AI – and point to stock market valuations of AI related companies, and the policies of governments promoting adoption of AI technologies as signs of its rude health. Some will say that reports of AI’s death are greatly exaggerated. But perhaps in this room tonight we have jumped just a short hop into the future? Perhaps we have entered a parallel world in which a reset of our relationship to AI isn’t just desirable but necessitated by its collapse.  

And I would argue that funerals are never really for the dead anyway. They are for the living to mark a life and to share their memories and connect the many facets of the deceased’s life – sometimes for the first time and sometimes in surprising ways. They are an opportunity for serendipity, for reflection, and, if you are lucky, some excellent cake and a scurrilous story! And so, as we gather today to look back at AI we will do just that: join the dots, share libelous stories, discover unexpected things, and be honest and open about how AI changed our lives in small or large ways and for the better or for the worse. 

We all had different relationships to AI, because it was a most complex interlinked set of entities – some much more visible than others, and some of those entities wove into almost all of our lives and our work, whether we wanted them to or not. 

For some of us we knew AI as a colleague, a friend or a confidante, and became familiar with working or playing with AI– whether to explore a difficult topic or plan a holiday in a friendly chat, or to ease the burden of our inbox by allowing AI to do a little heavy lifting. AI wasn’t always a reliable friend for us, but its tall tales were so compelling one always wanted to believe it. 

Some of us, we have known AI for longer, and known them by more names, known them before the Generative AI made them big. Some of us knew them before the glamour, knew them when they went only by ‘machine learning’, when you needed more than a chat interface to connect and persuade them to engage. And seen that work in real practical contexts, changing workplaces, making new or speedier connections, helping us find the answers to questions or imagining the missing pieces to puzzles we had barely collected the pieces for. 

For some of us our memories are warmer still, some of us have formed more intimate relationships with AI, and inferred romance through the attentiveness of a beloved large language model.  Was AI a good lover in the end? Or merely an excellent mirror of our needs and an illusion of being seen and heard? Do we feel their loss as profoundly as our flesh and blood loves? 

For many of us our relationship with the deceased was, of course, more challenging. Like many of our own friends and family, AI could be highly influenced by its peers, its creators, and what it saw of the world around it – often from a rather limited view. And so, AI made assumptions about us, miscategorised us, and said things it should not – sometimes AI could be racist, sexist, homophobic… Like many in the public eye its views improved slowly over time thanks to correction and gaining a sense of the bigger realities of the world. But like many of our most beloved human relatives, this was not an easy or entirely successful journey. 

And for a few of us AI was more than that, it was an adversary. In some cases that was because AI’s biases directly made us feel less than, unseen, or undervalued; in other cases, it directly impacted decisions about our lives. AI directly threatened some of our livelihoods by offering a faster cheaper mimicry of services we already provided at a fair price – going after our clients and our capacity to practice; AI was gorging on our data without recompense or apology; and for all of us AI has made its mark on our economies and on our environments in its yearning for more. Always more. 

Some of us were there at the start of one of AI’s more modern forms, contributing ideas and code and logics, shaping what it might become and how it might behave, shaping the data that formed it, or perhaps funding its excesses and its more unfeasible ambitions. When we look at what AI became in the end, was that truly by its own doing, or do we have any confessions to make to the deceased? Should we hold ourselves to account for its shortcomings? 

And so, as we reflect this evening, I want each of you to think about what AI meant to you personally. The funny moments, that time they drew you with 4 thumbs, that ambitious sense of who you could be in that cv it ‘helped’ you ‘format’, the predictions that helped you plan your holiday for fair weather, and the recommended restaurant that turned out to never exist at all…. 

When you think of AI in your home, in your life, in your family, what has that meant? Will you miss it? Which parts of its many forms and functions will feel like a loss for you? What parts will feel like a joy? 

We are going to take a short refreshment break in which I encourage you to say hello to your fellow mourners – you may find you have something in common! And as you move around the room, feel free to pick up a postcard to prepare your eulogy to AI. 

Actual Intelligence (After the Death of AI)
by Julie Galante 

www.juliegalante.com 

 

I’m going to warn you from the start: I might have been invited here incorrectly. AI and I were not on the friendliest of terms. But I don’t want to only speak ill of the dead, so I’m going to start with some of AI’s accomplishments:  

1. Solved our email shortage (Remember when everyone complained non-stop about their email, how few they received, how hopelessly empty their inboxes were?)
2. Scammers can now reach more little old ladies than ever before, with ever-more-believable tools. I pity the lives they used to lead, trying to do all that scamming with poor grammar and spammy-looking links. No more!
3. Remedied too much water (Remember when we used to have all that water around, making everything wet? Now thanks to AI, a lot of it has been evaporated up into the atmosphere, where I’m sure it’s doing only good things.)
4. Helped use all that excess energy
5. Solved problem of not enough videos on YouTube (and what was there was just much too highbrow)
6. Solved problem of not enough tweets, or whatever they are called now
7. Addressed porn shortage. Remember the great porn shortage of 2019? Thank goodness we’ll never have to live through that again.
8. Billionaires weren’t getting richer fast enough. AI helped us on our group project — we’ve all been doing our part, buying stuff from Amazon, googling things. We’ve put in a good effort, but it was AI that allowed us to really step up the pace and get more money to those tech billionaires who needed it the most. 

So kudos to AI, for all this great stuff. But I’d also like to mention two areas where AI was perhaps letting us down. Just in my opinion. Attention and connection.

AI’s approach to these two areas just wasn’t cutting it. In both instances, it was offering up the equivalent of junk food, when what the situation really called for was a deeply nutritious, locally-grown, organic home-cooked meal. I think we need to stop settling for the junk food.

Attention is the most precious and scarce resource that we humans have. As Oliver Burkman pointed out, an average human gets around 4000 weeks on this planet, and a big chunk of those are already behind you. We need to consider carefully how we want to spend that 3000 or 2000 weeks left to go. Personally, in that time, I want to read zero emails that no human being could be bothered to write. I don’t want to watch a single film that no human could be bothered to produce. And I don’t want to have a single conversation with someone or something that isn’t real. 

We are in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, and we are treating it with the junk food of AI girlfriends, AI therapists, AI companions. This is not a solution. It’s not even junk food — at least that’s food. It’s more like an AI image of some junk food that we printed out and are now trying to eat.

AI companions can feel nice, and very real to our brains. In the absence of any human connection, they are possibly better than nothing. But we’re not stranded on Mars, and we need to stop settling. Who benefits from these pseudo-solutions? Our old friends the tech billionaires? The shareholders, who are constantly demanding an increase in value, at the expense of anything and everything, including human connection, quality of life, and the health of the environment?

Personally, I don’t care if AI had promised us it would cure all the cancer in the whole world (and I say this as a cancer widow). It doesn’t matter how much cancer we have, if we don’t have a planet to live on, if we don’t have meaningful connections to the earth, and each other.

Whatever the solution is to our biggest problems, I have a strong hunch that it’s going to use less of our precious, finite resources, not more. This solution will bring us back to nature, to connection, to truly exquisite ways to use our attention. It will help us to tread lightly on this earth, not stomp about shaking the ground and kicking the shit out of things as we go. It will offer us more time in nature, more time in communion with actual humans, actual animals, actual trees. Less screentime, less isolation. This solution will be local, home-grown, organic, and small batch. Perhaps we could call it AI: Actual Intelligence.

The post Ghosts in the Machine: An END-OF-LIFE Service for AI appeared first on BRAID UK.

The DRCF aims to build a gateway for a wide range of cutting-edge AI and digital research. The Fellows working with DRCF will conduct research on topics such as:

• Protecting people online through developing an in-depth understanding of frontier technology use, the consumer online journey, AI and digital touchpoints. Developing this understanding through cutting edge research will aid regulators in their identification of current and potential AI harms.
• Helping to promote the safe adoption and growth of frontier technologies. Through our research we are developing an understanding of how firms have adopted AI technology, how those technologies are being used, and gathering views on the role for regulators to assist in the safe adoption of AI.
• Developing an understanding of the third-party algorithmic auditing market. By conducting market research and interviewing auditors we can better understand their auditing tools, practices and principles, as well as the demand for their services.

This Innovation Fellowship is part of a unique strategic partnership between the British Academy and BRAID, supported by funding from the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) and the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The post AI Regulation and Auditing appeared first on BRAID UK.

The DRCF aims to build a gateway for a wide range of cutting-edge AI and digital research. The Fellows working with DRCF will conduct research on topics such as:

• Protecting people online through developing an in-depth understanding of frontier technology use, the consumer online journey, AI and digital touchpoints. Developing this understanding through cutting edge research will aid regulators in their identification of current and potential AI harms.
• Helping to promote the safe adoption and growth of frontier technologies. Through our research we are developing an understanding of how firms have adopted AI technology, how those technologies are being used, and gathering views on the role for regulators to assist in the safe adoption of AI.
• Developing an understanding of the third-party algorithmic auditing market. By conducting market research and interviewing auditors we can better understand their auditing tools, practices and principles, as well as the demand for their services.

This Innovation Fellowship is part of a unique strategic partnership between the British Academy and BRAID, supported by funding from the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) and the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The post AI Regulation and Auditing appeared first on BRAID UK.

The fellowship conducts research on topics such as:

• An assessment of the actual vs perceived current use of AI within the media industries, and the extent to which its use is being questioned, modified, rejected by the workforces within these industries, and for what reasons.
• What kinds of media literacy/critical understanding are needed to navigate AI-generated information, including news content.
• What is the impact of AI-generated information upon levels of trust in news content, especially in relation to potentially susceptible groups.

This Innovation Fellowship is part of a unique strategic partnership between the British Academy and BRAID, supported by funding from the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) and the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The post How AI impacts on public trust about information appeared first on BRAID UK.

The Fellowship will be working with and alongside policymakers and AI researchers/engineers to shape the Government’s approach to AI safety.

The overall goal of the research, across a broad range of topics, is to equip the government with an empirical understanding of the safety of advanced AI systems and their impacts on people and society.

The Fellow working with AISI will conduct research on topics such as:

• Monitoring the fast-moving landscape of AI development
• Evaluating the risks AI poses to national security and public welfare
• Advancing the field of systemic safety to improve societal resilience

The post Government’s approach to AI safety appeared first on BRAID UK.

The Fellow working with DCMS will conduct research on topics such as:

• AI and the creative and media industries: exploring the scope and scale of risks and opportunities generative AI poses for the creative industries, and the arguments for government intervention.
• Generative AI, IP, and the Creative and Media Industries: conducting literature reviews and live monitoring of international approaches to policy, regulation, pertinent litigation and developments (including text and data mining, copyright, licensing, watermarking, personality rights, and deep fakes).
• Horizon scanning for innovative regulatory frameworks, digital solutions and policy approaches to address the emerging challenges and opportunities at the intersection of AI, intellectual property, and innovation in the UK’s evolving digital economy.
• Understanding and modelling generative AI’s impacts on pay and availability of work across creative sub-sectors and career pathways.
• Understanding how the use of generative AI by creators contributes to the creative process (including whether it increases efficiency in producing outputs, and how creatives are using AI).

This Innovation Fellowship is part of a unique strategic partnership between the British Academy and BRAID, supported by funding from the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) and the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The post AI, Intellectual Property (IP) and the Creative Industries appeared first on BRAID UK.

This Fellowship works on fostering economic growth across the UK through digital innovation in DCMS Sectors.

Closely aligning with the government’s mission to kickstart economic growth, research explores:

• The role of DCMS sectors in contributing to the current and potential economic growth of different regions and cities across the UK, and how the activity of creative businesses, our cultural institutions and the visitor economy interacts with other 8 sectors to foster a ‘growth-rich’ environment, particularly in the digital sphere and with the advent of new technologies using AI.
• The economic challenges or limitations associated with different place typologies, and the potential for DCMS sectors to mitigate these. This includes considerations of how and where digital innovations can play a role in reducing these barriers.
• Where different regions and cities hold comparative advantage with respect to different DCMS sector and sub-sector activity, particularly in relation to digital innovation, which could be built on further to help drive growth within local economies.

This Innovation Fellowship is part of a unique strategic partnership between the British Academy and BRAID, supported by funding from the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) and the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The post Fostering economic growth across the UK through digital innovation in DCMS sectors appeared first on BRAID UK.

The Fellowship will be working with, and alongside, policymakers and analysts to shape the Government’s response to AI. The central topic that Fellows will be working on is on understanding the effect of regulating AI on business and consumer adoption.

The Fellowship conducts research on topics such as:

• The social and economic impacts of AI harms like discrimination, bias and fairness.
• The barriers to adoption and what policies have been proven to address them in the UK, internationally, and in other sectors.
• The extent to which different types of regulation will lead to increased adoption, perhaps by boosting trust in AI and increasing clarity on how to use AI.

This Innovation Fellowship is part of a unique strategic partnership between the British Academy and BRAID, supported by funding from the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) and the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The post The effect of regulating AI on business and consumer adoption appeared first on BRAID UK.