Artificial Intelligence

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Ethan Busby, zooming in from Utah. His focus is especially on the use of Large Language Models in research, and current research focusses especially on the analysis of conversations in social media spaces, and the potential for automated tools to interact with such conversations.

The next speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Patrícia Rossini, who is also focussing on incivility. She begins by noting that this is a feature, and not a bug, of social media, and that conventional empirical research into incivility on social media tends to examine blatant forms (name-calling, profanity) rather than implementing more sophisticated perspectives.

The final speaker in this excellent opening session at I-POLHYS 2024 is the equally excellent Fabio Giglietto from the Vera.AI project, whose focus is on media political partisanship and polarisation in Italy. Especially noteworthy here is also that his project explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in news and social media research – a new approach that also needs a great deal of new validation approaches.

The next session at ANZCA 2023 is on journalism and war, and starts with Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen, whose interest is in how to visualise twentyfirst-century state and corporate power. Neglected from a visual perspective is that which is not seen – the invisible systems, structures, and processes of corporate-military power, and the indirect, systemic, or socially abstract invisible warfare in which we are immersed daily, and ineluctably participate on various levels.

The next and final keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Noshir Contractor; his focus is on the potentials inherent in computational social science. Communication research has become central to any academic discourse around the world over the past decades, but this also means that we must take on the grand societal challenges of the present day.

The second keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 this morning is Claes de Vreese, whose focus is on AI; he notes that Artificial Intelligence has been a theme of discussion for many years, but has really been turbocharged in recent years by the emergence of new technologies. But these are normal developments in an emerging field, and we should not conclude from this that we are in the midst of a major AI revolution. There is also a great deal of self-serving rhetoric about AI from AI companies themselves, of course.

AI itself remains underdefined, too. Definitions being used in the European Union are very broad, for instance, but also remind us that AI is more than natural language processing and machine learning only; there are many elements that intersect in the emerging AI ecosystem, and we might be better served by thinking about ‘hybrid intelligence’ (also involving humans) than pure artificial intelligence at this stage.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Nathalie Schäfer, whose focus is on bots on Instagram. Bots are pervasive there, and some users have banded together to detect fake accounts and highlight automated interactions that are seen as problematic. They do so with ‘bot police’ accounts that ask to be tagged whenever users encounter bots, and also provide advice on how to detect bots and report them to Instagram.

The third paper in this AoIR 2023 session is Matthew Salzano, presenting a paper co-authored with the late Misti Yang. Their work focusses on Joseph Weizenbaum’s critique of AI, the creator of the Eliza chatbot and prominent AI theorist whose work offers a valuable vocabulary for the current AI discourse.

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are my QUT colleagues Daniel Whelan-Shamy and Dominique Carlon. Their focus is on playful engagement with and between bots in the Subreddit Simulator. Here it is especially interesting to explore what happens when bots interact with each other without the involvement of humans; the Subreddit Simulator provides this space, and enables an automated engagement between some 250 bots that make post submissions and comments.

The final paper session on this first day at AoIR 2023 starts with Tony Liao and Liz Rodwell, whose interest is in AI chatbots; they begin by introducing the AI chatbot Replika, available as a Web and smartphone app, which is designed to steer users towards romantic and erotic conversations as they engage with it. This enables an examination of how users navigate their potential romantic relationships with the chatbot, and a comparison with the common relationship stages observed for human-to-human relationships.