“If our goal is to make better decisions and give good advice and care,is transparency always the answer?”
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UNSW AI Institute chief scientist Toby Walsh said some firms used simple automated processes that made clear the steps and variables – such as age,income and gender – factored into decisions.
Other companies,he said,used more complex systems whose decision-making was more difficult,if not impossible,to explain.
The government also adopted a recommendation to force privacy policies to set out the personal information to be used in “substantially automated decisions”,though Pounder said the types of decisions that fell under this definition were unclear.
Another key recommendation of the privacy inquiry,to which the government has agreed in-principle,is the so-called right to be erased or forgotten by outfits such as Google and have certain items removed from search engines.
Walsh said researchers were probing how to force large language models such as ChatGPT,which hoover up online information,to forget personal information.
“It’s very problematic,” he said,raising questions about the applicability of privacy rights in the AI era. “We don’t have good answers yet.”
ChatGPT,which spawned global debate on AI’s profound potential as it rose in popularity,was brieflybanned in Italy this year due to a suspected privacy breach. Its parent company,OpenAI,was forced to commit to give citizens a way to object to the use of their data to train the model.
CSIRO cybersecurity researcher Thierry Rakotoarivelo,who co-authored a paper on machine unlearning,said applying the right to be forgotten to systems like ChatGPT was much harder than it was for a search engine.
“If a citizen requests that their personal data be removed from a search engine,relevant web pages can be delisted and removed from search results,” Thierry said on September 11.
“For[large language models],it’s more complex,as they don’t have the ability to store specific personal data or documents,and they can’t retrieve or forget specific pieces of information on command.”
Labor also rejected a recommendation to force media companies to comply with privacy laws,a move the media sector claimed wouldharm press freedom.
Steggall earlier this year questioned media outlets’ publication of former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins’ leaked texts,arguing it wasan invasion of her privacy.
“The media is vital for strong democracy,and freedom of speech is very important,but it comes with responsibility and there’s a fine balance between that right and the right to privacy of individuals,” she said.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news,views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weeklyInside Politics newsletter here.