(Toronto) Randi Zuckerberg says he believes creators should start revealing whether they used artificial intelligence to produce works because it’s “increasingly difficult to tell what’s real.”
The tech industry leader behind Facebook Live, who left the social media giant in 2011 and has since founded a company that connects digital art creators with collectors, said she would like to see media organizations note when they used AI to write articles or even credit the technology in a byline.
Academics could offer similar levels of transparency, which could foster a trend toward disclosure across several sectors, she noted.
If this approach becomes the norm, “consumers can learn to be a little more discerning about what is real and what is not,” Ms.me Zuckerberg in an interview on the sidelines of the Ontario Innovation Center’s DiscoveryX conference in Toronto on Wednesday.
“Certainly, I think, it’s a problem that keeps a lot of us up at night,” she added.
The problem of misinformation has grown in recent years. About six in ten Canadians told Statistics Canada last year that they were “very or extremely concerned” about misinformation online, while 43 per cent felt it was increasingly difficult to decipher the truth online fiction compared to three years earlier.
AI has amplified the problem by making it faster, easier, and less resource-intensive to deceive people by using fake or doctored images, videos, and audio clips. In the past year alone, AI has been used to spread fake, explicit images of pop star Taylor Swift, depict the Pope wearing a puffy coat, and mislead people into believing that the host Canadian television broadcaster Mary Berg had been arrested.
Social media companies like Facebook, created by Randi Zuckerberg’s brother Mark Zuckerberg, have found themselves on the front lines in the fight against misinformation.
Even if Mme Zuckerberg isn’t sure how receptive the business world would be to these levels of disclosure, she thinks it’s important to start the conversation.
Those who take this approach to crediting AI will need to decide whether to disclose which robots or AI programs were used and even the queries that were made to produce their creations.
There are a lot of smarter people, experienced in the areas of AI, law and copyright, who are thinking about these issues at a deeper level. But I imagine we’ll see a world where at least some of these things need to be referenced right now.
Randi Zuckerberg
Even in the event of disclosure, said Mme Zuckerberg, people will have to decide what they think about “the value of content.”
“Would you listen to a podcast if you knew there were no humans behind it? she noted. Would you hang works of art entirely created by AI on your walls that no human has ever touched? »
Mme Zuckerberg, who invested in the hit theater production “Dear Evan Hansen,” said she thought a lot about these questions and decided she would be comfortable displaying artwork generated by AI on its walls.
“If something is beautiful, does it matter who created it? “, she said.
Access to reliable information
As the world grapples with AI, some regions also face challenges in accessing reliable information.
In Canada, the recent enactment of Bill C-18, known as the Online News Act, forced Google, Facebook and Meta Platforms, owner of Instagram, to enter into media compensation agreements. information for sharing their articles and reports.
In response, Google, which had threatened to block access to Canadian news on its platforms, finally agreed in November to make annual payments to news media collectively totaling $100 million. Meta took the opposite approach, removing Canadian news from its platforms.
Asked about the platforms that decide to no longer display articles and reports from news media, Mme Zuckerberg said, “a lot of the world has kind of turned to algorithms.”
“But the news aspect is tricky, because then it brings up things that keep us in an echo chamber,” she said, referring to a term used to describe when platforms offer to individuals with content that reaffirms their existing opinions rather than challenges them.
“News is almost the only category where you want to give people content that’s a little out of their rhythm to challenge their thinking a little more or broaden their horizons,” continued M.me Zuckerberg. This is the part that eludes us and I hope we can overcome it. »