Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Matt Candy – Successful approaches with Generative AI

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:26:05 GMT

The Conference's main partner IBM hosted a talk during Wednesday’s Getting Grounded session focusing on approaches on AI, its uses and adaptations and our relation with it.

Matt Candy presents the numerous opportunities that generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) offers, and provides insight into IBM’s human-centred approach to leveraging new technologies in their business.

Gen AI has an immense potential to grow GDP when used in smart and efficient ways. By learning how to integrate AI in all sorts of daily tasks, organisations can improve their business and, among other things, provide better customer experiences. How enterprises adopt and execute will define whether they unlock the larger scale of AI, according to Candy.

He emphasises the need for a human-centred approach, which is the fundament of IBM’s model for integrating Gen AI in their own organisation. This means using people’s actual tasks as the starting point for where to add value with Gen AI, as well as letting technology shape how we recruit in terms of desired skill sets.

According to Candy, people are only able to use Gen AI successfully when becoming an AI creator rather than a user. He provides us with what he considers to be the equation for Gen AI success in his talk.

Mary Wallace – The AI-Enhanced Consumer

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:26:05 GMT

The Conference's main partner IBM hosted a talk during Wednesday’s Getting Grounded session focusing on approaches on AI, its uses and adaptations and our relation with it.

Artificial intelligence provides us with new ways to communicate through products. In her talk, Mary Wallace portrays how AI can be used to improve consumers’ retail experiences within various industries, such as the beverage and fashion industry. For example AI can be implemented to bring life to inanimate objects like clothes, drinks and beds.

For brands, integrating AI into products serves as a gateway to other services. By collecting and analysing consumer data, brands can get to know their consumers on a deeper level. This allows brands to further personalise the consumer experience through their products. Thereby adding value to consumers as well as allowing brands to stay in the forefront of AI development, and differentiate themselves on the market. Consequently, Wallace states that “the product is no longer a product”.

Somya Joshi – Resource Frontiers of AI

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:26:05 GMT

“Could AI ever be a common pool of resources?”

Researcher Somya Joshi makes a compelling observation: the same extractive narratives of 19th century industrialisation are being reproduced today in our venture to conquer the AI ecosystem. Somya highlights how major technological shifts such as the Green Revolution relied on the premise that automation would always lead to progress, and the myth around this pattern persists in the case of AI.

Somya reminds us that following the major revolutions seen in history, power eventually remained in the hands of the elites. In parallel, other authors have discussed the “unequal geographies and distributive effects” in the extraction and manufacturing stages involved with progress and technology. The footprint of labour has traditionally been made invisible in the process, and the same now applies to the footprint of materials such as water, copper and silicon, mainly sourced in the Global South.

Somya calls for the normative act of imagining equity to ensure a sustainable and more just future by seeing AI as a common resource for global use.

Trudy Painter – Algorithms behind AI - A case for technical literacy in AI

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:26:05 GMT

“It’s very fun to make AI tools magical. [...] But when you make AI feel airy, you remove the possibility for people to ask questions. So it’s better to make it approachable.”

Trudy is an active technology enthusiast who is convinced that AI tools can be as useful as electricity. By providing real-life examples and related metaphors of ceramic mugs and paper cups, the recent MIT graduate firmly believes that everyone can - and perhaps should - be able to understand AI tools and how the algorithm works “under the hood” in order to be better informed when making decisions around its usage and implementation in organisations.

Trudy conveys a clear and easy-to-follow explanation of how AI generation differs from the everyday search on our internet browsers. While search engines retrieve information from existing websites that the algorithm judges relevant, AI generation patches up an artifact which replicates human speech and predicts “the most likely next word” based on patterns observed in human interaction. AI literacy is hence of utmost relevance now that AI tools have reached their most capable and accessible stage yet.

Q&A – Humanity, (AI)mplified

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:11:49 GMT

Q&A from the session Humanity, (AI)mplified – The AI Tools We Use to Be More Human with Laura Herman (Oxford Internet Institute,) Ovetta Sampson (Google) and Charlotte Högberg (Lund University)

Charlotte Högberg - The Doctor is In: Assistive Intelligence in Healthcare

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:11:28 GMT

How can AI be used for the common good or more precisely in healthcare? Charlotte’s work explores what futures are possible and desirable but also what we are at risk of losing. AI's role in healthcare can have harmful effects but also huge potential benefits. She emphasises the need to raise vital questions and consider consequences. Awareness of nuances, understanding risks and avoiding unethical technology is key because this touches upon high stake decisions (literally about life and death).

“We need to be in the often uncomfortable spaces in between - at least for a while”

Constant critical engagement and trust calibration is needed because there are no quick fixes for these new emerging issues - for example how much can we augment until humans are only operators - and is this something we want to strive towards?

She closes her talk with a both hopeful and cautious remark. She advocates daring to dream of AI-specialist collaboration, while maintaining agency, responsible exchange and upholding medical ethics and common goals.

Ovetta Sampson - Design Principles for a Pluralist Automated Future

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:11:12 GMT

"Data is the love language of machine learning, but we must remember that it is not true."

We all create data. And all data is created by people. Ovetta Sampson wants us to remember this, both in order to centre humanity but also to clarify the vulnerabilities of data. We are biased, so the data we create is infused with biases as well. Whether it is by the sin of omission or the use of inequitable variables, traumatised datasets manifest in real world situations such as applying for a bank loan or decisions made on housing and education.

Ovetta urges particular caution for the encounters between humans and machines in the era of AI and machine learning. It's not Skynet, not yet, but ceding decision making responsibility to such systems can lead to harmful consequences. The best way of countering these resides in responsible, human-centred design frameworks which capture the minimum viable data, maintain balance in the exchange of what people give and what they receive, and include iterative privacy by default.

Ovetta ends with a rigorous set of responsible design practices to combat the amplification of our human biases by AI systems.

Laura Herman - The Human Creative Director: Remixing, Seeing, Curating

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:10:50 GMT

“What would you make if you did not have to generate it?”

Global platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok enable creatives to show their work to wider audiences. However, these platforms also operate using algorithms that determine which content appears in users' feeds and what remains unseen.

This dynamic has significant implications: firstly, algorithms replace the work that elite institutions such as museums and art galleries traditionally have done. We tend to explore what grabs our attention instead of spending time with art pieces that might need more time to examine and understand. Secondly, recommendation systems influence the way creatives show their work. Collaborators in Laura’s projects shared that they sometimes publish works that will perform well but not necessarily challenge them as artists or show their best work.

“How would you describe your taste to a machine?”

This has an influence on our perception of the world and on the evolving role of humans as creators. Laura believes generative AI tools can be seen as an additional tool in the creatives’ toolbox. Along with this, there is a shift of focus from production to curation.

Coming up with ideas and thoughtful concepts is becoming more crucial than the production process itself as this can be (partially or entirely) assisted by generative AI tools. Taste and critically selecting criterias will become sought-after creative skills. She closes her talk with provoking questions like how art pieces look different depending on who they were aimed to be created for.

Simone Rebaudengo – (Artificial) Intelligence

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 08:50:35 GMT

“Is 65% spoon-ness a spoon?”

“Something truly smart might rather do something unexpected.”

Simone Rebaudengo is exploring the way we are living and interacting with networked and autonomous things. In this talk he is showing us some of those experiments and explorations, challenging the mainstream perception of AI. He is humourising and democratising the understanding of, and relations to artificial (or other) intelligences.

oio.studio, or “The other intelligences operation” explore different kinds of intelligences. What is AI? Is it talking cylinders? What else? Is it possible to co-design a product together with an AI from scratch? Is there maybe something to learn in trying to create an object in the hardest way possible? By putting together AI and craftsmen with artisanal intelligence and exploring a continuous back and forth between human and machine, you start to get interesting results - things that no human would have designed themselves. How do we live with other intelligences? What if there is an actual ecosystem of intelligences, of connectivities. Can an object have an intelligence, a history, a future? Instead of focusing on the artificial, autonomous and anthropomorphic, we could rather look at artisanal, augmenting, adapting, acceptable (and many other) intelligences.

Nick Seaver – (Artificial) Intelligence

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 08:50:29 GMT

“Sticky websites are traps designed to capture people.”

Artisanal traps have two faces: where hunter and prey, two entities, meet. Computers are a kind of human trap. Can we see the image of the hunter and the prey in these computer-traps in the same way as the anthropologic traps? The interface is in fact the meeting point in between worlds.

Engagement is in the very structure of how our technical products work. This means that reimagining the relations between designers, coders, and users is the way to “get out of the trap”.

Nick Seaver is an anthropologist of technology who studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. In this talk he explores how we throughout history have created traps. We used to do it to capture animals, today we are capturing human minds through digital screens, a phenomenon called “addiction by design” and “sticky websites”.

Maya Indira Ganesh – (Artificial) Intelligence

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 08:50:21 GMT

“Lager networks might have a slight conscious.”

Maya Indira Ganesh is a cultural scientist who explores the poetics and policies of AI and metaphors, asking the question what do we mean when we say AI?

Language is metaphorical, bridging the gap between our feelings and the thing itself. Why are metaphors important in the language of AI? It allows us to understand and convey things that are complex. The person who controls the metaphors sets AI in motion, it lets us think about the future relationship and needs to be described with clarity and regulations. So, what do we actually want AI to do?

Q&A – (Artificial) Intelligence

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 08:49:49 GMT

Q&A for the session (Artificial) Intelligence featuring Simone Rebaudengo (oio.studio), Nick Seaver (Tufts University) and Maya Indira Ganesh (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence)