MIT CSAIL Team Looks At Building Trust On The Internet

With these questions in mind, let’s look at some of the work being done around building trust online.

Here’s another question: what does all of this have to do with AI? Well, as AI comes online, and starts to permeate our lives, it’s going to be a major driver of information, presumably, both good and bad. The content and the input is going to come in fast and furious, and so often, we won’t be able to know whether it’s human-generated, or not.

With that in mind, experts are getting serious about addressing the issue of trust. In addition to fundamental cybersecurity work, people are also trying to promote the idea of building better digital infrastructure that’s more trustworthy…

One possible solution is coming from the MIT CSAIL lab, where scientists are trying to figure out how to create a browser extension that will help you assess various parts of the web. (It’s actually related to a greater project of building numerous browser extensions and fostering human-computer interactions.)

David Karger explains how this trust-building project should work, and what it can do.

Essentially, you’re getting an assistive labeling technology to show you what parts of the web are built with safe content, and where the danger of misinformation might lie.

Karger stipulates that many current platforms don’t have a lot of trust infrastructure built in. The team at MIT wants to change that, to “empower individuals and organizations” with tools like accuracy assessments.

These early initiatives show how we might be able to rein in some of the bigger problems with ‘alternative facts’ on the Internet in the future.

You can also start by thinking about those trusted sources (like Wikipedia, perhaps) that do a better job of consolidating a consensus and not spinning information on the fringes. In Wikipedia’s case, the reliability comes through a particular kind of crowd-sourcing. It might seem counterintuitive – in the end, we may not know exactly why Wikipedia is so right on so many things, but we know, from factual analysis, that it is.

Or to think about this a different way, you can look at these various guidelines from John Hall at Mashable, including “don’t trade the soul of your brand” for quick attention results, and “don’t lend your voice and ideas to things that you know to be untrue.”

For more, check out this list of responses from various professionals in a release from the Pew Research Center suggesting that “trust will diminish because the Internet is not secure, and powerful forces threaten individuals’ rights.”

Writing in 2017 (as did Hall, above) Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson note that – “the Internet was not built with trust building in mind, and about a quarter of these experts predicted that there are a number of threats that will be hard to defeat.”

This piece, by proxy, presents corporate forces and bad actors including black hats as elements that might push web content into darker or shadier territory.

In any case, the Internet also suffers from the same issues that cable news channels have: the idea of echo chambers and the difficulty of accessing content that might challenge your own ideas.

You may have seen those modern media maps that shows you the various slants and angles of different digital or online media venues. We sort of have an intuitive understanding that this fractionalization might harm our sense of reality, but you see it more clearly when you take a closer look.

Anyway, keep an eye on the efforts of the CSAIL team, and others, to develop new tools to help us deal with challenges from AI and everything else in the next decade.

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