AI-Enabled Solutions for Real-World Problems
Advancing the SDGs, Addressing Truth in Journalism, and Pathways Towards Responsible Governance
The 2024 AI for Good Global Summit, united global experts to explore AI’s role in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the urgent need to develop and regulate this transformative technology to benefit all of humanity.
The Summit is a treasure trove of the most up-to-date AI and sustainable development content available — and everyone can access it. The Summit’s YouTube playlist boasts over 170 recordings of insightful presentations, panels, workshops, and interviews.
Don’t miss these three standout conversations, chosen not for their high profile speakers but because they present a thorough understanding of current realities with tangible solutions for moving forward.
1. From Artificial to Authentic: How AI Solves Real-World Problems
Dr. Tasha Austin-Williams from Deloitte’s AI Institute reveals the transformative power of AI through ethical frameworks and current applications in malaria control, deforestation prevention, and sustainable agriculture.
2. AI and Journalism: Can AI Help Monitor Truth?
Explore how AI is revolutionizing journalism, from combating fake news and enhancing content authenticity to automating tasks and empowering local news, while addressing challenges like echo chambers that limit exposure to diverse viewpoints.
3. From Principles to Implementation — Pathways Forward from AI Governance Day
Discover how AI Governance Day set the stage for ongoing AI regulation discussions at the Summit, highlighting key insights like the need for interoperability, and innovative solutions to bridge digital divides and combat disinformation.
From Artificial to Authentic: How AI Solves Real-World Problems
Witness the power of Artificial Intelligence as it leaps from futuristic concept to practical problem-solver. Through compelling use case studies and dynamic discussions, Dr. Tasha Austin-Williams, Executive Director of Deloitte’s AI Institute for the Public Sector, unveils how AI is revolutionizing industries, unravelling insights, and redefining the future of problem-solving.
In this presentation, Dr. Austin-Williams emphasized moving AI conversations from theory to practical, authentic implementation. She highlighted three key areas:
- Addressing Human Biases with AI: Dr. Austin-Williams urged the audience to use AI to uncover and mitigate their own biases. She shared research on scholarship applications, revealing how word choices influenced decisions. She demonstrated a “bias preventor” tool that helps identify and counteract these biases, promoting equitable outcomes.
- Responsible AI Usage: Dr. Austin-Williams described Deloitte’s Trustworthy AI Framework, which encompasses several key principles to ensure AI technologies are developed and deployed ethically and effectively, including:
- Fairness and Impartiality: Ensuring that AI models and data are representative of the diverse communities they serve. This involves actively identifying and mitigating biases in data collection and algorithm design to avoid exacerbating existing inequalities.
- Transparency and Explainability: Prioritizing making AI processes and decisions understandable. This includes developing models that can clearly explain their decision-making processes, allowing stakeholders to trust and comprehend how outcomes are derived.
- Responsibility and Accountability: Establishing clear guidelines on accountability for AI systems. Defining roles and responsibilities to address any negative impacts from AI use, ensuring there is a plan for managing and rectifying issues.
- Robustness and Reliability: Focusing on the reliability of AI models by continuously testing and updating them to reflect real-world scenarios. This includes stress-testing AI systems to ensure they perform accurately under various conditions and maintaining their effectiveness over time.
- Privacy and Security: Committing to protecting the privacy and security of data used in AI systems involves implementing stringent data protection measures and ensuring that data usage aligns with the original consent given by individuals, preventing unauthorized access or misuse.
3. AI for the SDGs: Dr. Austin-Williams concluded her presentation with specific examples of ways Deloitte is currently using AI for sustainable development progress.
- Malaria Control: Deloitte developed an AI virtual assistant for the Global Fund, aiding in data analysis and evidence-based decision-making to combat malaria.
- Deforestation Prevention: Collaborating with WWF, Deloitte created a predictive model to detect and prevent illegal deforestation, with successful deployments in Indonesia.
- Subsidy Allocation for Farmers: An AI chatbot helps Dutch farmers navigate complex subsidy landscapes, promoting sustainable agriculture.
AI and Journalism: Can AI Help Monitor Truth?
Deepfakes, plagiarism, misinformation, lack of trust, loss of jobs — the problems that plague journalism today are exacerbated by Generative AI tools that make it child’s play to create “fake news”. But, can the integration of artificial intelligence into journalistic practices become the antidote to these challenges? This session explores how AI will change journalism as we know it and what we can do to ensure that the results are a force for good.
Speakers
- Felix Zeltner, Founder, Remote Daily
- Robin Raskin, Founder, The Virtual Events Group (VEG)
- Frits Bussemaker, Chair, Institute for Accountability in the Digital Age (I4ADA)
Challenges Posed by AI
- Content Authenticity and Trust: The rise of AI-generated content brings concerns about transparency and authenticity. AI’s ability to create synthetic content that is indistinguishable from human-produced journalism necessitates stringent verification processes to maintain trust. Fact-checking is complicated by an abundance of contradictions: there’s no fact that you can’t find at least five contradictory facts. There’s also the problem of sources claiming that true information is false.
- Hyper-Personalization: AI’s role in content distribution through algorithms can lead to hyper-personalization, creating echo chambers and limiting exposure to diverse viewpoints. This phenomenon risks polarizing audiences further.
- Job Displacement: Automation of routine reporting tasks by AI threatens job security for many journalists. The potential for AI to replace human effort in generating straightforward news stories could reduce opportunities within the field.
Opportunities and Solutions
- Efficiency and Automation: AI can automate routine tasks such as transcribing interviews, generating basic news reports, and copyediting. Tools like Grammarly, Google Cloud Vision AI, and Google’s Journalist Studio are already enhancing quality control and productivity.
We have to get over the shame of saying AI created this… Dall-E made this image for me… I got this information from ChatGPT and I checked it five other ways. That has to kind of become part of our narrative now. — Robin Raskin
- Data-Driven Insights: AI excels in analyzing vast datasets to uncover patterns and trends, aiding investigative journalism. LLMs are good at creating structure from unstructured information. Advanced tools like Google’s Pinpoint allow journalists to sift through extensive data quickly, focusing on analysis and reporting. These tools create ways for you to spend more time reporting and thinking and synthesizing and analyzing and less time um searching for the needle in the haystack.
- Combating Misinformation: AI can assist in fact-checking by cross-referencing information from multiple sources, reducing the spread of misinformation. Fake news debunkers and fact-checking tools are pivotal in this effort.
- Enhancing Content Verification: Collaborations between technology companies and media organizations are developing tools to verify the authenticity of content. Adobe’s partnership with Leica and Nikon, for instance, aims to create a secure chain of trust from content creation to publication.
- Empowering Local Journalism: AI can support local and hyper-local news outlets by providing content aggregation and distribution tools, ensuring that local stories reach broader audiences.
- Educational Adaptation: Journalism education must evolve to include training in AI tools and data analysis. Teaching journalists to be data scientists, which emphasizes foresight and scenario planning, will prepare journalists to navigate and leverage future technological advancements.
Building Trust and Community
Central to navigating AI’s impact is the need for transparency. Journalists must be open about the use of AI in their work, clearly labeling AI-generated content and maintaining rigorous standards of verification. Building community trust through continuous engagement and dialogue remains essential.
We were trained as journalists to not trust anyone, and the the counter question ‘is why should anybody trust us?’ Rebuilding this trust I think has a lot to do with community. You have tough conversations with people that you maybe disagree with in a in a safe space — year round, not just coming here once a year but really being involved. — Felix Zeltner
From Principles to Implementation — Pathways Forward (from AI Governance Day)
This is a great recap of AI Governance Day that you might have missed because it took place before the Summit officially kicked off.
Speakers
- Tomas Lamanauskas, Deputy Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
- Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences at United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
Global Regulation Overview
AI Governance Day highlighted a whirlwind of activity in the AI regulatory landscape, with discussions spanning the EU AI Act, the US Executive Order on AI, recent AI Safety Summits in the UK and South Korea, and China’s evolving regulatory framework. The G7 Hiroshima AI Process also featured prominently, signaling a concerted global effort to navigate the AI frontier responsibly.
Recent UN Activities
The UN has played a pivotal role in developing standards and governance frameworks across various sectors, including disaster management, health, autonomous driving, and agriculture. The global consensus on AI ethics achieved in 2021, with 194 countries endorsing the framework, highlights a shared commitment to ethical AI development.
In the lead-up to the Summit of the Future, the UN’s focus on responsible AI governance is set to expand. Capacity development and technical standards are at the forefront of the ITU’s agenda. The organization has developed 220 standards applicable to AI and is intensifying its collaboration with the International Standards Organization (ISO) to establish coherent international standards. Efforts to combat deep fakes and misinformation, including watermarking techniques, are also gaining momentum.
AI Governance Day Themes
Mr. Lamanauskas concluded with this summary of clear themes that had emerged.
- Responsible frameworks matter. We need to tie AI very closely to ethics and human rights.
- People want interoperability among technology platforms so smaller providers and players can also participate. It’s not always possible to have a one regulatory approach, but the approaches need to be interoperable.
- We need technical standards to keep AI working for the good of humanity. Leverage AI to bridge digital divides and ensure we don’t create new ones.
- Global solidarity and resource sharing, like high-performance computing or other resources, can help us achieve our AI goals of managing risks while leaving no one behind.
Conclusion
These sessions just scratch the surface of the expert views shared at the AI for Good Global Summit. While they might not feature the highest profile speakers from the Summit, the current challenges and practical solutions they spotlight make them conversations worth paying attention to. Stay tuned for more of our highlights, insights, and in-depth analysis from the 2024 AI for Good Global Summit.
Learn More
Watch the AI for Good YouTube channel for Main Stage talks, highlights, and interviews from the AI for Good Global Summit.
Read the most recent edition of the UN Activities on AI Report, which showcases 408 AI cases and projects run by the UN system covering all 17 of the SDGs.
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Check out SDGCounting for the latest news on tracking the progress of the Sustainable Development Goals. #SDGs #GlobalGoals.
Disclaimer: This article uses YouTube transcripts and ChatGPT-4o to help summarize and proof-read. All content for the article was hand-curated and checked for quality.
