How young people's integrity is protected when an artificial influencer is created
14 Sep 2020
In the project The Life of A.R.T, the goal is to develop an artificial influencer that will attract more young people to a future in technology. The project is based on data generated by young people on social media. The ethical rules of data collection have been debated in recent years, but the project has placed great emphasis on finding an ethical method where young people's integrity is protected.
The goal of the project The Life of A.R.T is to develop an artificial influencer who talks technology with young people. To appeal to the target group, the influencer must be created based on their own preferences. Therefore, a data collection is currently underway that analyzes the target group's behavior on Instagram.
- Young people are more limited in their ability to assess risks and overview consequences, which makes them more vulnerable than adults. It is important to us that the data collection is not done at the expense of the participants' integrity, says Andreas de Blanche, researcher in natural sciences, computer and information science at University West.
The working group has designed a method for data collection that takes into account the ethical positions. Only finished data is stored and images, links, opinions or other content can not be traced back to any specific person.
- What will be saved is data of the type, 25% of the people belong to group A and 75% belong to group B. Of the 25% who belong to group A, 67 have blue hair. Since the population is very large, all Instagram accounts, it is unlikely that an identifiable subgroup will be created in the data set, says Andreas.
Analyzing data without saving it is a technical challenge. The tools need to be both fast and robust to carry out the analysis completely without interruption. This also increases the demands that everything must be right from the start.
- Since we use artificial intelligence for the analysis tool, it is extra difficult to do the processing "online". We need to perform AI Training without saving data and with limited opportunity to restart the training from the beginning, Andreas concludes.
Contact:
Andreas de Blanche, Email: andreas.de-blanche@hv.se, Phone: +46721600183
More about A.R.T (in Swedish)