Wicked problems: Vian Bakir gives keynote for pan-Wales AI network/The Alan Turing Institute

Across 2022, Andrew McStay (Prof. of Digital Life, Bangor Univ.) has been co-organising a pan-Wales AI network, as part of the growth of The Alan Turing Institute. Vian Bakir (Prof. of Journalism & PolComms, Bangor Univ.) recently addressed this interdisciplinary network with a keynote on ‘The Role of the Humanities and Social Sciences in AI Policymaking: a personal journey of twists and turns in the service of solving ‘Wicked Problems’.

Here she outlined some of her scholarship across the past decade that led her and esteemed colleagues to address the wicked problem of informational capitalism, leading them to influence India’s Supreme Court (on the right to informational privacy).  It also led them to co-create with artist Ronan Devlin an interactive art installation, ‘Veillance’ (making viscerally visible the various forms of corporate and governmental surveillance that track users’ browsing activity on their mobile phones). 

Building on this, her recent work (with McStay) explores what happens when informational capitalism meets technologies capable of emotional profiling and influence. As a result, they have been engaging policymakers on the harms (especially emotionalised false information) arising from emotional AI in social media and coming forms of biometrics that enable profiled, emotionally optimised, targeted content to be sent to users.

Most recently, this can be seen in their invited submission to the UK DCMS Online Harms and Disinformation Sub-Committee Inquiry into Misinformation and Trusted Voices. Their submission is titled, ‘Addressing false information online via provision of authoritative information: Why dialling down emotion is part of the answer’.