Page 26 - EngineerIt May 2021

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI, freedom of expression

and the press

By Hanno Brink, Synthesis Machine Learning Engineer

A to machines. The European Convention
free press or media has an important role to play in democracies as it is responsible
for gathering and distributing the information that citizens use to decide how they
of Human Rights states that each person
are going to vote. They then have the further responsibility to monitor and hold
receive and impart information and ideas
those in power accountable. Free press also plays a role in society by providing a platform has the right “to hold opinions and to
for advocacy, expression of opinion and for society to create a shared understanding of the without interference by public authority
important issues and the best way to go about solving them. However, the mind-boggling and regardless of frontiers,” and AI is
amount of information that we have produced far exceeds any person or organisation’s likely to have an impact on both the press
ability to make sense of or moderate it. This has necessitated the use of automated tools as well as individuals when it comes to
that approximate human insight to produce, curate and moderate content at scale. responsibly exercising this right.
First, let us look at content
How can AI benefit press and consumers? moderation. This is basically an AI filter
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can potentially aid a free press in fulfilling its role in society. It can on what is allowed to be published.
assist journalists in researching and producing content. They can now, with AI, examine It would be great if we could prevent
and understand vast amounts of unstructured data, quickly translate relevant texts, and dangerous or hateful content from being
transcribe and analyse video or audio content. published; however, the biggest problem
The use of AI-generated content (for content that relies heavily on data and is mostly is that there seems to be no universal
routine) can free up journalists’ time to focus on more complex and impactful content. This understanding of what qualifies as hate
can also speed up the distribution of news to consumers, especially time sensitive news speech. It is notoriously difficult to make
such as financial news. judgements on this, even for human
AI can help in delivering curated content to each user based on the information that judges, and context and intent play a
might be most relevant and important to them. This personalisation can give them an huge role.
improved news experience. If this moderation is not done
Finally, AI can also be used to assist in the moderation of social media, where it is correctly, we risk silencing legitimate
helping to moderate vast amounts of public content. AI can make these media platforms speech and impacting freedom of
more beneficial to society by identifying and moderating legitimate security risks such as expression. AI would need to balance
fraud, fake news, extremism and terrorism, as well as help to identify instances of hate limiting fake news with the freedom
speech and harassment. to discuss controversial ideas, and
challenge long-held beliefs. Because
How does AI pose a risk to freedom of expression? of these fears, as far as I am aware,
It is very clear that AI needs to form an integral part of the new media world. However, platforms have only been using AI as
there are real risks in handing over the responsibility of content curation and moderation a tool to flag potentially problematic

EngineerIT | May 2021 | 24