Read the full article on the ai.objectives.institute blog
Using our prototype discourse visualization tool Talk to the City, we mapped Twitter conversations about the impacts of AI, and identified six distinct perspectives:
1. Ethical approaches to tackling current harms
2. AI is Inscrutable and Difficult to Control
3. Calls for Independent & Democratic Oversight
4. Dangers of Rapid Development
5. Human Interests are Hard to Formalize
6. Optimistic AI Futures
Each points to specific risks and courses for action, but we found significant overlap between the groups, and calls for more collaboration from all points of view.
We plan to continue the project of making these conversations more visible, and to create contexts that support richer, multi-threaded approaches to discussing problems of AI safety – and we hope others in the space will join us in doing so.
Background
In the last few weeks, conversations about the future of artificial intelligence and its societal effects have grown exponentially, in response to new product announcements and calls for safe adoption of new technology (such as the Future of Life Institute open letter and many opinion pieces). These discussions incorporate a variety of concerns – on AI ethics, AI safety, long-term concerns, and societal goals – in a conversation of increasing importance not just for the people working on these issues directly, but also for the global population whose lives they will affect. But for effective collective action, we believe we need to bring visibility to each perspective and their interactions, to capture the nuance of each viewpoint and prevent majority views from obscuring the full extent of discussion.
Last week, we started to analyze and visualize this conversation with a collective deliberation tool we're building called Talk to the City. At AI Objectives Institute (AOI), a nonprofit research incubator, we're building tools for collective sensemaking and scalable coordination, with the goal of using AI safely to help institutions and societies build resilience.
We used Talk to the City to map this space of discourse: capturing conversations happening on Twitter and other platforms, and grouping tweets by topic, to help us create clusters of similar viewpoints on what can and should happen in the face of rapidly advancing technology. Our objective was to distill what each cluster believes to be the most important facets of this conversation, and which approaches they believe will result in the best outcomes.
Early Prototype, Preliminary Results
This experiment in mapping Twitter conversations is far from an in-depth summary: it is a first attempt at collecting data and categorizing relevant views, using a prototype tool we're still iterating on. We're doing this now because we expect AI safety discourse will continue to grow in scale and complexity. At AOI, we think that tools for collective discourse need to capture the nuance and diversity of views in large-scale conversations – and we believe our ongoing work towards that goal will benefit from feedback on early results. In parallel, we're integrating content from outbound Twitter links and from collective deliberation platforms like Pol.is, with the eventual goal of capturing input from a wide variety of platforms with relevant discussion. Ultimately, we aim to turn Talk to the City into a platform for more effective deliberation and policy development, by giving policymakers better visibility into continuous discourse at unprecedented depth and scale – but this is our first test of the platform as an early prototype.
If you notice important perspectives we've missed, please point them out to us! If you find specific tweets you don't see reflected in our analysis, retweet them and mention @AIObjectives, and we'll investigate. We'll be updating this project continually, to incorporate more of the conversation and reflect how it morphs over time. If you're interested in the thinking behind tools like Talk to the City, check out our whitepaper. If you think we've made mistakes and want to help us improve, get in touch at hello@objective.is. Our goal is to offer ever-evolving prototypes that help create visibility into collective discourse at scale, and to use that visibility to improve the tools we make.
See the full analysis
(posted to ai.objectives.institute where tweet embeds still work)
Mapping discourse using Talk to the City seems like an innovative way to capture and analyze conversations happening on social media platforms. It's interesting to see how the tool can group tweets by topic and create clusters of similar viewpoints on the topic of rapidly advancing technology. I think this approach can be very useful in understanding public opinion and shaping policy decisions. Thanks for sharing!"
Thank you AOI for creating tools for AI for good. Super intriguing work!