Joshua Chalifour

The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite
interesting. I've facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented
some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools
and I've been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep
coming back to and which I don't feel gets the attention that it merits,
is the potential to **consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc. as
tools to be used for examining human cultures, behaviours, and
society**.

Most conversations I've seen about the utility of these tools revolves
around the novelty of what they produce (text outputs, image outputs,
coding assistants, etc.) and the ramifications. That garners debate on
the ethics of how they work and how those outputs may be used,
legitimate or otherwise. It certainly deserves critical analysis. In
many ways though these systems are banal, they're essentially
instructions for identifying and repeating patterns.

What, to me, is incredible about them is not just that they're
identifying patterns in human behaviour (all the material that they're
trained on), but that once these patterns are identified, we now see
that it becomes possible to generate new content believably replicating
the patterns. That seems enormous for better studying and understanding
*ourselves*.

Yesterday, when the Center for AI Safety posted its [Statement on AI
Risk](https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk), [I
felt](https://cosocial.ca/@owlyph/110459623979640299) the underlying
premises or motivation for the statement were concerning. The statement
(signed by many business leaders, academics, and others with significant
stakes or interests in AI) says:

> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority
> alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear
> war.

On the surface, this seems agreeable, however there's so much to unpack
in that statement. I'm not interested in attempting that now; I think AI
is murkier than it's presented there. I would like to refer to my
initial point. Human-created, AI is essentially mirroring us. The
statement's formulation is both disingenuous and abdicates
responsibility. The statement starts off in the wrong.

If AI systems produce results or get used in ways that create the real
possibility of exterminating human-kind, then we need to seriously
examine and change these patterns in human behaviour that enable that.
What is it about the hundreds of thousands of social media conversations
that were scraped to train the model, which repeats in such ways that it
is possible to predict a new utterance that humans accept as the way
we'd expect a human to talk? What is that in all the Wikipedia entries?
What is that in all the digitized magazine and newspaper advertisements?
Because who thought that human culture is so incredibly predictable that
non-living, non-thinking, non-feeling algorithms can give the appearance
of something indistinguishable from a human?

The fear expressed in the statement is not a fear of AI at all. It's a
fear of humans destroying ourselves. If the people developing AI treat
it as an object of otherness, promote it as such, and encourage
discourse of it as such--if we all adopt that discourse, we distance
ourselves from ourselves and cannot understand what we are doing. I hope
to see more serious research projects in the humanities and social
sciences, which focus on the *lens that AI is* and then *examine it for
understanding our cultures and behaviours*.


The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite interesting. I’ve facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools and I’ve been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep coming back to and which I don’t feel gets the attention that it merits, is the potential to
<strong>
 consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc.
</strong>

Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us

I've been thinking about something like an instance **Community Pledge**
becoming commonplace. Mastodon instances tend to post rules, user
expectations, a tiny bit of info about administrative practices. This
helps cultivate the Mastodon region of the fediverse. But, and I don't
mean the following as criticism, most instances have not communicated
what their administrative commitments to their community are. Perhaps
because until recently things have been on a smaller scale & practices
are maturing.

Here is what I've been considering. It's a thought process but not at
all, thought-out. There are problems but I'd like to put the idea out
there in case others have worried about this and perhaps, something can
come of it. This is written in 500 character paragraphs because I was
originally going to thread it in
[Mastodon](https://social.coop/@owlyph/109301118653885466){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://social.coop/@owlyph/109301118653885466"} but it got too
long.

What happens if an instance owner suddenly disappears? Radically changes
their stance on how the instance operates? Chooses to block federation
from other instances that many people have active connections to?

I think a Mastodon-style federated instance has unique responsibilities
to the members of its community. Mastodon instances could be owned and
operated by an individual or group of individuals, a coop, a commercial
entity, a not-for-profit sort of entity (e.g. professional org, NGO,
etc.), an institution (educational or government), among others. Each
has its reasons. Administering these communities isn't like owning
another type of website, where control can be mostly absolute.

Participants in Mastodon communities are building relationships that
feed into their personal, professional, or other contexts. We've all,
together, nurtured our instances' communities and feel a bit of, I
dunno, pride/joy/ownership/belonging? (else why do people fret about
choosing/moving instances?). **Since the protocol interconnects these
communities, I think administrator responsibility isn't just local but
extends along the lines of people's connections to other
communities/instances**.

Admins ready to reckon with what they'll pledge to their community,
could build better communities. A pledge might, for example include: 1
contingency procedures if the instance were to shut down (backups,
infrastructure, funding, death/disappearance?). 2 Federation approach
(rationale, why/why not specific instances federate, process for
notifying & ideally, consulting with users when a new instance may be
blocked).

Example 3, Clarity on other decisions (all decided by single admin? are
moderators participating? can others become moderators and if so, what's
the process? formal decision-making structure? outside factors like
people or organizations that could exert influence on the decisions?) A
few of these examples are built into the
[social.coop](https://social.coop/terms/) model and some other
instances.

What can users expect from participating in a community? Upon signing up
we know what is expected from us but not the other way around. I don't
think an admin should be forced into offering a pledge. But I imagine
eventually something unpleasant will happen, in which people lose their
service, become disappointed, or regret being a part of an instance, and
that will all federate too. A pledge from the admin, if not enforceable,
might help set expectations or influence reflexive responsibility.


I’ve been thinking about something like an instance
<strong>
 Community Pledge
</strong>
becoming commonplace. Mastodon instances tend to post rules, user expectations, a tiny bit of info about administrative practices. This helps cultivate the Mastodon region of the fediverse. But, and I don’t mean the following as criticism, most instances have not communicated what their administrative commitments to their community are.

Could Mastodon Instances Make a Pledge to Their Communities?

I've been reading the draft consultation version of the [Canadian
Digital Information
Strategy](https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/028.nsf/eng/00528.html "Download the draft of the Canadian Digital Information Strategy")
([PDF](http://www.lac-bac.gc.ca/obj/012033/f2/012033-1000-e.pdf)). The
strategy proposes strengthening content, ensuring its preservation, and
maximizing its access and use. These are important for many reasons the
report addresses regarding culture; the report also has some anchors in
industry, stating that "nations that nurture their digital information
assets and infrastructure will prosper."

In explaining why we need a strategy the report says

> "Digital content will be more and more in the form of conversations
> between people, using many different media types."

This requires a more solid understanding of what constitutes
conversation. The different media are one issue but within the use of
those media the constructs of a conversation vary hugely. From blog
posts to instant messages, even the selection of hyperlinks you choose
to place in your web page.

The report offers a grid (p. 10) categorizing content by its source,
motivation, audience, and characteristics. I believe there is a
miscategorization here in that one source is the public domain and civil
society whereas other sources are the business world or academic
community. The report notes there may be some overlap but I think this
categorization could be reconsidered and improved. The overlap seems too
great to make the existing categories meaningful. In particular, I don't
see why the public domain is held separate from the rest, since it is
not the same sort of a category at all. Every other category can include
the public domain.

A key assumption in the proposed strategy is that

> "Information access and use supports Canada's societal goals-In
> society, equitable information access fosters equal opportunity for
> learning, creative and commercial enterprise."

I think this is a wonderful base assumption, not simply for recognizing
the need to have equitable access but also because I think it requires
recognition of the integral role that this access plays for learning,
creative, and commercial enterprise. And because information access
leads to what enables people to access it-so if you read the report
you'll see various (welcome) mentions of open standards and sources.

An outcome the strategy seeks is that Canada's **information assets and
knowledge are preserved in digital form**. There is the point that we
and future generations ought to have ongoing access to our digital
knowledge and information assets, especially with regard to the
intellectual, scientific, and creative accomplishments. I'm glad this
point is in the forefront because it is a big problem. I touched on this
in a post previously, commenting on our [political
motivation](http://www.phydeau.org/chroknowlogy/intellectual-liberty/2007/motivating-anti-ip-activism-in-canada/ "Motivating Anti-IP Activism in Canada")
in terms of our heritage.

Unfortunately, I feel that the strategy doesn't outline a sufficient
method for ensuring the storage techniques to make this digital
preservation clearly the right choice. Not that I'm saying it isn't, but
we have many flaws to deal with in terms of digital preservation and I
think those must be worked out much more completely. The plan does cover
some ground in this regard.

For example, in the objectives for ensuring preservation, it states

> "We are confronted with the need to choose what will be preserved and
> what will not."

It calls for a reasoned framework to do so. The strategy notes that
we're incapable (presently) of storing all the information we create.
But haven't we always had this problem? We've never been able to store
everything (digital or not) and what we do keep in museums and archives,
is not necessarily placed there because of a reasoned framework. I'm not
saying we shouldn't have such a framework however, but I'm questioning
what it should be used to accomplish.

For all the digital information we create, how do we determine what will
be significant to the future? Nobody's ever thought it was an important
idea to record every phone conversation for eternity. However, now that
we're looking at conversations in digital mediums, weblogs for example,
and we feel like they've got to be preserved. Is the impetus for this
the digital medium? I think the more difficult part of the preservation
task is determining the "what" rather than the "how"and I suppose that's
the purpose of the framework. Any framework though is going to be
developed within our present context so I wonder how it will be able to
account for the rapid changes that take place in digital mediums? When
hyperlinks constitute conversations do they cease to be preservation
worthy in the same way as day-to-day phone conversations? Interesting
problem.

To continue on the "how" side of the digital preservation thread, the
strategy addresses trusted digital repositories (TDRs), which cover the
"policy, process, standards, and technology framework for digital
preservation."So TDRs address the "how" for making digital information
accessible to future generations. We're lacking a thorough discussion of
what we need to do to train future generations so that they're able to
understand and access these TDRs. We cannot just assume that the work we
put into creating them will easily carry on to the next generation. A
TDR is a complex system, relying on current technologies that may be so
obsolete that they're not even comprehensible to future generations.
That's an ongoing concern.

Furthermore-the TDR idea, while not completely articulated yet (and as
the strategy mentions, a proper TDR does not exist in Canada yet) does
promote

> "...common attributes and open standards; provision of guidance and
> training; and development and sharing of open source tools."

Great that it is being couched in open standards and open source.

One **potential risk of TDR**s is that they might conceivably be used as
official checkplaces for "*intellectual property*" rights. I think this
stands a great chance of being detrimental to the assumptions of the
document for equitable access and the nurturing of digital assets. I may
have a pessimistic view, but current IP trends, as controlled by
short-term commercial enterprise, suggest that my pessimistic view for
such a rights repository would be a likely consideration for misuse or
abuse.

On developing an effective TDR, the strategy promotes the idea that
"Effective R&D will enable the technical foresight and constant
vigilance required to manage and preserve digital information" which is
nice thinking but I still think this calls for a more deliberate
outline.

Switching gears, an idea the strategy introduces, which really
fascinated me was

> "creating new competencies and positions such as '**digital
> curators**' who would have stewardship responsibility for digital
> information."

The strategy recommends raising

> "the profile of digital preservation needs and challenges within
> creator communities..."

This is important because the changes digital media have provoked are
barely audible in public discourse. As a whole, we should make these
issues commonly understood by the greater population so that they can be
acted on with political will. Information is within our environment and
ought to be considered intimately.

The Library and Archives Canada draft strategy covers a lot of ground
and raises important points for further discussion. I loved seeing that
it was introduced to the public for commentary too (I suppose I wouldn't
be writing this post otherwise).


I’ve been reading the draft consultation version of the Canadian Digital Information Strategy (PDF). The strategy proposes strengthening content, ensuring its preservation, and maximizing its access and use. These are important for many reasons the report addresses regarding culture;

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us

Could Mastodon Instances Make a Pledge to Their Communities?

Some Notes on the Canadian Digital Information Strategy Draft