The Download: AI for good, and China’s shrinking internet
—Melissa Heikkilä
Last week, Geneva played host to the UN’s AI for Good Summit. The summit’s big focus was how AI can be used to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, such as eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving gender equality, promoting clean energy and climate action and so on.
The conference managed to convene people working in AI from around the globe, featuring speakers from China, the Middle East, and Africa too. AI can be very US-centric and male dominated, and any effort to make the conversation more global and diverse is laudable.
But honestly, I didn’t leave the conference feeling confident AI was going to play a meaningful role in advancing any of the UN goals. In fact, the most interesting speeches were about how AI is doing the opposite. Read the full story.
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Read more of Melissa’s stories about the issues within the AI sector:
+ How generative AI has made phishing, scamming, and doxxing easier than ever.
+ We are all AI’s free data workers. Fancy AI models rely on human labor, which can often be brutal and upsetting. Read the full story.
+ The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent.
+ Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone. Each time you use AI to generate an image, write an email, or ask a chatbot a question, it comes at a cost to the planet. Read the full story.
