Using AI to Banish the Echo Chamber

[Aaditeshwar Seth]

https://seas.harvard.edu/news/using-ai-banish-echo-chamber

I think this is quite exciting. Starting from my PhD thesis and then Gram Vaani and several student projects still ongoing and in my book, making the public sphere suitable for participatory democracy has been a key theme in our work. We summarized the echo chambering and other ills of social media as three axes to solve for: Context, Completeness, and Credibility, that should be ensured in the collection of "messages" that a user receives or is recommended. The messages should enhance the contextual explanations and connections for a user, they should convey a complete picture, and they should be credible which itself is a recursive concept that is shaped by a user's self perception of how credible the message appears to be given their beliefs. These three pillars have been the core of Gram Vaani's work on running participatory media platforms that are moderated to enhance context, completeness, and (objective) credibility. 

Then down the line to algorithmize this, we also added ideas like long-term fairness and short-term diversity in the messages that are recommended to a user, that all put together across a long period of time the messages should fairly cover multiple aspects to provide a complete picture, but also in the short-term as a daily news digest or activity feed the messages should cover diverse aspects to improve user engagement and prevent dropouts. More recently, PhD student Saurabh has been validating these ideas through studies with real users. 

Having AI summarize and specifically be mindful of completeness can take this further. Of course, as long as we don't give up on democracy! 

In fact, in my book I have a semi-disconnected chapter on why tech assisted public spheres are vital for society to retain control over tech, which puzzled the few readers of the book back then on what such a chapter was doing in the book. 

Adi

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Aaditeshwar Seth
Microsoft Chair Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi

Co-founder, Gram Vaani; Co-founder, CoRE Stack

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Technology and (Dis)Empowerment: A Call to Technologists

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