Oxford Internet Institute

So here is Andy Burnham talking up this threat of hostile bots warping the vulnerable childlike minds of British internet users.

The Oxford Internet Institute carried out a study in 2017, and, uh, it's, it's referenced in my FSU report.

You c- you can click on the link and look at it yourselves.

It found a tiny proportion of posts about Brexit had any connection with Russia, and their reach was minuscule.

So...

There are studies, for example, by the Oxford Internet Institute, which has examined thousands of tweets before the Brexit referendum and found little evidence of Russian interference.

Although, to be fair, Twitter later revealed that the Russian broadcast RT had spent a total of £767 on adverts during the referendum.

Oh, dear me.

It isn't just Russia either.

A 2019 report by the Oxford Internet Institute found organised social media manipulation in 70 countries and Facebook and Twitter had traced campaigns aimed at foreign audiences to governments including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In 25 of those countries, governments were hiring private firms offering what the researchers called computational propaganda as a service.

Somebody somewhere is sending invoices for this.

Humans labeling images, rating answers, moderating content, and correcting the things machines still can't get right.

But how important are these workers to the AI industry? Is this decent work? And if you're offered a job training AI, how do you know you're going to be treated fairly or even paid? I asked Professor Mark Graham, professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute and founder of the Fair Work Project exactly that.

He started by explaining what AI gig work actually is.

I think what a lot of people don't realize is that, uh, AI is a very labor-intensive industry.

Now, before we get started, as always, if you're enjoying the podcast, please follow it on your favorite platform, rate it positively, and tell your friends and colleagues about it.

Today, I'm really happy to have with me to talk again about China's approach to AI, Kayla Blomquist, who's Executive Director at the Oxford China Policy Lab and researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Welcome, Kayla.

Thank you so much for having me.

My name is James Muldoon.

I'm a research fellow at the University of Oxford at the Oxford Internet Institute, and I, I prefer myself unscripted, so I'll take a slightly different tone.

I'm also not coming from a clinical perspective.

I'm a sociologist with a background in philosophy, and I taught at a political science department for five years.

Um, but in fact, you know, independent research completely undermines this.

Research by the Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford, a highly respectable institution, delved into this, and it found that posts that appeared to have emanated from Russia amounted to a minuscule proportion of the posts that people had read on social media concerned with, with the referendum.

And, uh, by minuscule, I'm talking about, uh, less than a thousandth of one percent.

And yet, along with that, a whole series of claims can be dated back to that period that keep on being repeated and are being repeated again now by Burnham and his members of the cabinet.

I think, though, the FT article has a really good quote.

The journalist interviewed Bernie Hogan, who's an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, whether he thought LinkedIn ghostwriters would help cut through AI slot.

He talks about that a bit, but the bit that caught my attention a lot was the message behind the post can still be sincere even if you didn't write it.

He compares this to buying a greeting card.

Yeah.

And Oxford Internet Institute economist Carl Benedict Fry is actually warning that civil unrest will precede mass unemployment.

Because AI handles simple tasks so well, the basic entry-level jobs are just vanishing.

Which brings up Sherm's suggestion.