Open source search engines give users more control over their online experience.
There have been alternative search engines that do their own web crawl for a while, but as Google's search gets less efficient and it gets cheaper to create AI generated content, they are becoming more relevant. Because they are not proprietary, these alternatives to commercial search engines let users bypass restrictive policies and licensing fees, and researchers say that "open source search engines provide an excellent way and material for people to learn, study and master search technology."
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A 2023 report from Internet Watch Foundation AI is increasingly being used to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Researchers examined 20,254 AI-generated images that were posted to one dark web CSAM forum over the course of one month and a preliminary review found that 11,108 of them were likely criminal. Ultimately, 2,978 were deemed criminal per UK law. They also concluded that the AI-generated images are increasingly becoming visually indistinguishable from CSAM that involve real people, that much of it focuses on celebrity children and people who have previously been abused, and that there is potential for massive growth in this criminal area.
Community Health and Collective Security Human Rights Issue 2023AI could be used to better meet the needs of the disabled, but there are currently many instances where it actively works against the disabled community.
In 2023, researchers at Pennsylvania State University published “Automated Ableism: An Exploration of Explicit Disability Biases in Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis Models,” which explores the bias embedded in several natural language processing (NLP) algorithms and models. They found that every single public model they tested “exhibited significant bias against disability,” classifying sentences as negative and toxic simply because they contained references to disability, ignoring context and the actual lived experiences of disabled people.
Community Health and Collective Security Disability Justice Issue 2017AI systems reflect the culture's bias against the disabled.
The Allegheny County Department of Human Services in the state of Pennsylvania in the United States uses an AI system that residents allege incorrectly flags disabled parents as being neglectful, removing their children from their homes with no actual evidence of neglect. It is currently under investigation by the United States Department of Justice.
Community Health and Collective Security Disability Justice Human Rights Issue 2023Medicare Advantage insurance plans use AI to determine what care it will cover for its 31 million elderly subscribers in the United States.
Journalists at Stat found that companies are specifically using AI systems to deny coverage for care. The massive problem: the algorithms are a black box that can’t be peered into, making it nearly impossible for patients to fight for health care coverage when they don’t know why they were denied it in the first place.
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