Introducing { Latent Space } – a technology newsletter from WITNESS

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</script> </div></div> <div id="primary" class="content-area"> <main id="main" class="site-main" role="main"> <article id="post-28093" class="post-28093 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-campaigns tag-ai tag-citizen-media tag-content-moderation tag-deepfakes tag-disinformation tag-newsletter"> <div class="entry-content"> <style type="text/css"> #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; }<br /> /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.<br /> We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */<br /></style> <p><em><b>—August 2020</b></em></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Technology touches all of our lives, so it touches all of the work we do at WITNESS. But there are some areas of technology more than others that are focal points for our <strong>Emerging Threats and Opportunities</strong> and<strong> Tech + Advocacy</strong> programs. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We’re in the vanguard of conversations on <strong>artificial intelligence</strong> and <strong>synthetic media</strong> (<a href="https://lab.witness.org/projects/synthetic-media-and-deep-fakes/">deepfakes</a>), <strong>content moderation</strong>, and <strong><a href="https://blog.witness.org/2020/05/covid-19-misinformation-response-assessment/">mis- and disinformation</a></strong>, and we wanted to create a channel for discussing these issues in more depth. That’s why we’re launching <a href="https://mailchi.mp/witness/latent-space"><strong>{ Latent Space }</strong></a> – a newsletter that will bring together different strands of our technology research in a more transparent, conversational way.</span></p> <p> <link href="//cdn-images.mailchimp.com/embedcode/classic-10_7.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> <style type="text/css"> #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. 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WITNESS’s work in this area is driven by the impact of content moderation on both <strong>human rights documentation</strong>, and on the <strong>safety and security of human rights defenders</strong> themselves. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Efforts to “eradicate terrorist and violent extremist content” online continue to expand, threatening vast bodies of human rights content. At the same time, <strong>violent content directly linked to offline violence remains online</strong>. When companies do remove content linked to offline violence, they may fail to preserve potential evidence or have no established mechanism to share it with key parties, as just happened with the UN’s Independent Investigative Mechanism on Myanmar. That’s why WITNESS is involved in key multi-stakeholder conversations about these issues in places like the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We’ll also talk about developments in artificial intelligence, especially when these developments have implications for the global information space. For years now, WITNESS program director <strong>Sam Gregory</strong>, and more recently program coordinator for emerging threats <strong>Corin Faife</strong>, have been at the forefront of mapping the human rights implications of deepfakes, videos that use AI to simulate realistic looking scenes that never took place. Our work here has clarified not only the <strong>threats posed by deepfakes</strong>, but also the dangers of <strong>overly broad legislation</strong> meant to prevent them, which could stifle freedom of expression and be used to silence speech.</span></p> <p>Lastly, w<span style="font-weight: 400;">e’ll be featuring key news from other sources and links to relevant events, because there’s so much great work being done by other organizations in this space. WITNESS’s work comes not only from the expertise of our team members, but from our <strong>connection to global networks </strong>of technologists, journalists, activists, and other human rights defenders worldwide.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our newsletter isn’t just for policy wonks and AI engineers (though we do hope they’re reading too). It’s aimed at anyone who wants to learn more about tech policy and engineering issues from a perspective <strong>based in lived experiences and human rights</strong>. While we have honed in on deepfakes and terrorist and violent extremist content with laser focus, we regularly comment on broader issues, and we’ll do our best to keep you up to date on news from ourselves and our myriad friends and allies in the field.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the field of machine learning, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">latent space </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">is a way of <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-latent-space-in-machine-learning-de5a7c687d8d"><strong>encoding of data in a compressed form</strong></a>. A neural network is trained to find commonalities in a kind of input data – a map layout, a page of text, an image of a face – and reduce the data into a representation that contains the key features of the data but not the full detail. 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Introducing { Latent Space } – a technology newsletter from WITNESS - WITNESS Blog