Who do you trust on the Internet?
A better question might be: Is trust even possible on the Internet?
And by extension: is trust possible everywhere in the media?
Business network concept. Customer service. Shake hands.
With these questions in mind, let’s look at some of the work being done to build trust online.
Here’s another question: what does all this have to do with AI? Well, as AI comes online and begins to permeate our lives, it will become a major driver of information, likely both good and bad. Content and contributions are going to come in fast and furious, and many times we won’t be able to tell if they’re human-generated or not.
It is with this in mind that experts are seriously tackling the issue of trust. In addition to fundamental cybersecurity work, people are also trying to promote the idea of building better, more reliable digital infrastructure…
One possible solution comes from the MIT CSAIL lab, where scientists are trying to figure out how to create a browser extension that will help you evaluate different parts of the web. (This is actually related to a larger project to create many browser extensions and promote human-computer interactions.)
Portrait of David Karger
David Karger explains how this trust-building project should work and what it can do.
Essentially, you get assistive labeling technology to show you which parts of the web are built with safe content and where the danger of misinformation might lie.
Karger states that many current platforms don’t have much built-in trust infrastructure. The MIT team wants to change that, to “empower individuals and organizations” with tools like accuracy assessments.
These early initiatives show how we might be able to get a handle on some of the biggest problems with “alternative facts” on the Internet in the future.
You can also start by thinking about those reliable sources (like Wikipedia, perhaps) that do a better job of building consensus and not spreading information to the margins. In the case of Wikipedia, reliability comes through a particular type of crowdsourcing. This may seem counterintuitive – ultimately, we may not know exactly why Wikipedia is so right about so many things, but we know, through factual analysis, that it is.
Or to think about it in a different way, you can look at these different guidelines from John Hall at Mashableincluding “don’t trade the soul of your brand” for quick attention results, and “don’t lend your voice and ideas to things you know are wrong.”
For more, see this list of responses from various professionals in a Pew Research Center statement suggesting that “trust will decline because the Internet is insecure and powerful forces threaten the rights of individuals.”
Written in 2017 (as is Hall, above) Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson note that “The Internet was not built with trust in mind, and about a quarter of these experts predicted that there are a number of threats that will be difficult to defeat.” »
This article, by proxy, presents corporate forces and bad actors, including black hats, as elements that can push web content into darker or darker territory.
Regardless, the Internet also suffers from the same problems as cable news channels: the idea of echo chambers and the difficulty of accessing content that might challenge your own ideas.
You may have seen them modern media cards which shows you the different orientations and angles of different digital or online media sites. We sort of intuitively understand that this splitting could harm our sense of reality, but you see it more clearly when you look closer.
Regardless, keep an eye out for the efforts of the CSAIL team, and others, to develop new tools to help us address the challenges of AI and everything else over the next decade.