FWIW, the movement strategy included a recommendation* for having a
technology ethics review process [1]; maybe this is a good opportunity to
experiment with creating a precursory, unofficial version of that - make a
wiki page for the sock puppet detection tool, and a proposal process for
such
On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 2:18 AM Nathan wrote:
> I don't see how any part of it constitutes creating biometric identifiers,
> nor is it obvious to me how it must remove anonymity of users.
>
The GDPR for example defines biometric data as "personal data resulting
from specific technical processing
On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 6:39 PM Ryan Kaldari wrote:
> Whatever danger is embodied in Amir's code, it's only a matter of time
> before this danger is ubiquitous. And for the worst-case
> scenario—governments using the technology to hunt down dissidents—I imagine
> this is already happening. So
On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 7:43 PM Amir Sarabadani wrote:
> * By closed source, I don't mean it will be only accessible to me, It's
> already accessible by another CU and one WMF staff, and I would gladly
> share the code with anyone who has signed NDA and they are of course more
> than welcome to
For my part, I think Amir is going way above and beyond to be so thoughtful
and open about the future of his tool.
I don't see how any part of it constitutes creating biometric identifiers,
nor is it obvious to me how it must remove anonymity of users.
John, perhaps you can elaborate on your
On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 9:44 PM John Erling Blad wrote:
> Please stop calling this an “AI” system, it is not. It is statistical
> learning.
>
>
So in other words, it is an AI system? AI is just a colloquial synonym for
statistical learning at this point.
--
Brian
Please stop calling this an “AI” system, it is not. It is statistical
learning.
This is probably not going to make me popular…
In some jurisdictions you will need a permit to create, manage, and store
biometric identifiers, no matter if the biometric identifier is for a known
person or not. If
Thank you all for the responses, I try to summarize my responses here.
* By closed source, I don't mean it will be only accessible to me, It's
already accessible by another CU and one WMF staff, and I would gladly
share the code with anyone who has signed NDA and they are of course more
than
For better or worse, it seems clear that the cat is out of the bag.
Identity detection through stylometry is now an established technology and
you can easily find code on GitHub or elsewhere (e.g.
https://github.com/jabraunlin/reddit-user-id) to accomplish it (if you have
the time and energy to
Thanks Amir for having this conversation here.
On Nathan's point: outside the Wikimedia projects, we of the free
culture movement tend to argue for full transparency on the functioning
of "automated decision making", "algorithmic tools" , "forensic
software" and so on, typically ensured by open
As others, I see several problems
1. If the code is public, someone can duplicate it and bypass our internal
'safekeeping', because it uses public data.
2. Risk of misuse by either incompetence or malice
3. Risk of accidentally exposing legitimate sockpuppets even in the most closed
off
I appreciate that Amir is acknowledging that as neat as this tool sounds,
its use is fraught with risk. The comparison that immediately jumped to my
mind is predictive algorithms used in the criminal justice system to assess
risk of bail jumping or criminal recidividism. These algorithms have
I think an important thing to note is that it's public information, so such
a model, either better or worse can easily be built by an AI enthusiast.
The potential for misuse is not much as it's relatively easy to game, and I
don't think that the model's results will hold more water than behaviour
For those interested; the best solution as far as I know for this kind of
similarity detection is the Siamese network with RNNs in the first part.
That implies you must extract fingerprints for all likely candidates
(users) and then some to create a baseline. You can not simply claim that
two
Nice idea! First time I wrote about this being possible was back in
2008-ish.
The problem is quite trivial, you use some observable feature to
fingerprint an adversary. The adversary can then game the system if the
observable feature can be somehow changed or modified. To avoid this the
Technically, you can make the tool open-source and keep the source code
secret. That solves the maintenance problem (others who get access can
legally modify). Of course, you'd have to trust everyone with access to the
files to not publish them which they would be technically entitled to
(unless
I'm afraid I have to agree with what AntiCompositeNumber wrote. When
you set up infrastructure to fight abuse – no matter if that
infrastructure is a technical barrier like a captcha, a tool that
"blames" people for being sock puppets, or a law – it will affect
*all* users, not only the abusers.
That's a tough question, and I'm not sure what the answer is.
There is a little bit of precedent with
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?oldid=2533048=Extension:AntiBot
When evaluating harm, I guess one of the questions is how does your
approach compare in effectiveness to other publicly
Creating and promoting the use of a closed-source tool, especially one
used to detect disruptive editing, runs counter to core Wikimedia
community principles.
Making such a tool closed-source prevents the Wikimedia editing
community from auditing its use, contesting its decisions, making
Hey,
I have an ethical question that I couldn't answer yet and have been asking
around but no definite answer yet so I'm asking it in a larger audience in
hope of a solution.
For almost a year now, I have been developing an NLP-based AI system to be
able to catch sock puppets (two users
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