Weizenbaum Library (Weizenbaum Institute)
Not a member yet
864 research outputs found
Sort by
Digitale Souveränität
Full text linkDer Begriff „digitale Souveränität“ ist aus dem politischen Diskurs nicht mehr wegzudenken. Man ist sich über Parteigrenzen hinweg einig: Digital souverän sein, das ist erstrebenswert und wichtig. Dabei bleibt aber unklar, was es eigentlich genau bedeutet, digital souverän zu sein und wie man diesen wünschenswerten Zustand erreicht. Fast jede digitalpolitische Maßnahme ließe sich heute mit dem Ziel der digitalen Souveränität rechtfertigen und rhetorisch aufpolieren. Trotzdem ist digitale Souveränität mehr als ein bedeutungsleeres Schmuckwort. Sie verdeutlicht die politischen Dimensionen digitaler Infrastrukturen und verweist auf Handlungsspielräume, in denen wir unsere digitale Zukunft selbstbestimmt mitgestalten können. Um digitale Souveränität in ihrer ganzen Bandbreite zu veranschaulichen, widmet sich dieser Kompaktüberblick drei zentralen Fragen
Zwei Welten der KI in der Arbeitswelt: Wie Management und Betriebsräte die Einführung und Nutzung von KI-Anwendungen gestalten
Full text linkDie vorliegende Befragung von 385 Managern und 224 Betriebsräten in besonders KI-affinen Branchen und Betrieben zeigt, dass der Einsatz von KI-Anwendungen dort immer mehr an Dynamik gewinnt. Etwa die Hälfte der befragten Betriebe nutzen mindestens eine KI-Anwendung im Regelbetrieb. Wenn Pilotprojekte berücksichtigt werden, steigt der Anteil der Betriebe mit KI-Anwendungen auf etwa zwei Drittel. Besonders verbreitet ist der Einsatz von KI-Anwendungen in den Funktionsbereichen IT, Verwaltung sowie Vertrieb und Marketing.
Die zentralen Ziele der Einführung von KI sind die Automatisierung von Arbeitsschritten und Stärkung der Effizienz der Prozesse. Fast zwei Drittel der befragten Betriebe experimentieren allerdings auch und führen KI-Anwendungen zur Erprobung des Potentials der Technik ein. Die zentralen Herausforderungen für die Unternehmen beziehen sich auf die Rekrutierung qualifizierten Personals und Fragen der Datenbereitstellung, wie die Absicherung gegen Datenschutzrisiken oder Sicherung der Datenqualität. Es wird zudem ein dringender Handlungsbedarf bei den Ausbildungsinstitutionen gesehen, um der rasant steigenden Nachfrage nach KI-Fachkräften zu entsprechen
Agenda formation and prediction of voting tendencies for European parliament election using textual, social and network features
Full text linkAs per agenda-setting theory, political agenda is concerned with the government’s agenda, including politicians and political parties. Political actors utilize various channels to set their political agenda, including social media platforms such as Twitter (now X). Political agenda-setting can be influenced by anonymous user-generated content following the Bright Internet. This is why speech acts, experts, users with affiliations and parties through annotated Tweets were analyzed in this study. In doing so, the agenda formation during the 2019 European Parliament Election in Germany based on the agenda-setting theory as our theoretical framework, was analyzed. A prediction model was trained to predict users’ voting tendencies based on three feature categories: social, network, and text. By combining features from all categories logistical regression leads to the best predictions matching the election results. The contribution to theory is an approach to identify agenda formation based on our novel variables. For practice, a novel approach is presented to forecast the winner of events
Response to the Consultation on the Delegated Regulation on Data Access provided for in the Digital Services Act
Full text linkThis response provides feedback on the Delegated Regulation on Data Access provided for in the Digital Services Act. It is informed by a variety of exchanges with empirical platform researchers across Germany and Europe. The first section highlights clarifications and proposed procedures for non-public data access which are practical, workable or welcomed by scientists for other reasons. The second section outlines further opportunities for clarification, additions, or modifications to the draft text, particularly regarding the data access procedure, the data access portal, the types of data, as well as the documentation and modalities of data access
In Generative AI We Trust: Can Chatbots Effectively Verify Political Information?
Full text linkThis article presents a comparative analysis of the potential of two large language model (LLM)-based chatbots—ChatGPT and Bing Chat (recently rebranded to Microsoft Copilot)—to detect veracity of political information. We use AI auditing methodology to investigate how chatbots evaluate true, false, and borderline statements on five topics: COVID-19, Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Holocaust, climate change, and LGBTQ + -related debates. We compare how the chatbots respond in high- and low-resource languages by using prompts in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Furthermore, we explore chatbots’ ability to evaluate statements according to political communication concepts of disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theory, using definition-oriented prompts. We also systematically test how such evaluations are influenced by source attribution. The results show high potential of ChatGPT for the baseline veracity evaluation task, with 72% of the cases evaluated in accordance with the baseline on average across languages without pre-training. Bing Chat evaluated 67% of the cases in accordance with the baseline. We observe significant disparities in how chatbots evaluate prompts in high- and low-resource languages and how they adapt their evaluations to political communication concepts with ChatGPT providing more nuanced outputs than Bing Chat. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based chatbots in tackling different forms of false information in online environments, but also point to the substantial variation in terms of how such potential is realized due to specific factors (e.g. language of the prompt or the topic)
Website blocking in the European Union: Network interference from the perspective of Open Internet
Full text linkBy establishing an infrastructure for monitoring and blocking networks in accordance with European Union (EU) law on preventive measures against the spread of information, EU member states have also made it easier to block websites and services and monitor information. While relevant studies have documented Internet censorship in non‐European countries, as well as the use of such infrastructures for political reasons, this study examines network interference practices such as website blocking against the backdrop of an almost complete lack of EU‐related research. Specifically, it performs and demonstrates an analysis for the total of 27 EU countries based on three different sources. They include first, tens of millions of historical network measurements collected in 2020 by Open Observatory of Network Interference volunteers from around the world; second, the publicly available blocking lists used by EU member states; and third, the reports issued by network regulators in each country from May 2020 to April 2021. Our results show that authorities issue multiple types of blocklists. Internet Service Providers limit access to different types and categories of websites and services. Such resources are sometimes blocked for unknown reasons and not included in any of the publicly available blocklists. The study concludes with the hurdles related to network measurements and the nontransparency from regulators regarding specifying website addresses in blocking activities
Can Sustainable Shopping Recommendations in Online Retail Help Reduce Global Warming?
No full textTwo dominant and contradictory narratives describe the apparent contribution of information and communication technology (ICT) to climate change. On the one hand, ICT can reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by, for example, supporting energy efficiency or promoting sustainable consumption. On the other hand, the increased energy demands of emerging software components leveraging artificial intelligence or machine learning can be directly and indirectly responsible for GHG emissions. This makes it critical to assess whether ICT mitigates or exacerbates net climate impacts and the contributing factors. The impacts of software have received relatively little attention and require the development of new approaches to conduct such assessments. In particular, the net effect of complex real-world applications is frequently not measured. In this study, we provide a detailed step-by-step assessment to quantify the net global warming potential of an online shopping recommendation system that encourages users to make sustainable consumption decisions. We consider the energy consumed and associated GHG emissions in the development and use of the software and compare these to the potentially avoided GHG emissions associated with more sustainable recommended options. The results demonstrate that the software has the potential to indirectly avoid more emissions than it causes and that changes at different steps of the software can amplify this.This publication has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII121, 16DII122, 16DII123, 16DII124, 16DII125, 16DII126, 16DII127, 16DII128 – “Deutsches Internet-Institut”)
Splitter einer Zwischenevaluation [Rezension]
No full text**Rezension von**:
Aaron Benanav, Automatisierung und die Zukunft der Arbeit. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2021
Dagmar Bürkardt / Harald Kohler / Norbert Kreuzkamp / Josef Schmid (Hrsg.), Smart Factory und Digitalisierung. Perspektiven aus vier europäischen Ländern und Regionen. Baden-Baden: Nomos 2019
Johanna Muckenhuber / Martin Griesbacher / Josef Hödl / Laura Zilian (Hrsg.), Disruption der Arbeit? Zu den Folgen der Digitalisierung im Dienstleistungssektor. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag 2021
Sabine Pfeiffer, Digitalisierung als Distributivkraft. Über das Neue am digitalen Kapitalismus. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2021
Christiane Schnell / Sabine Pfeiffer / Roland Hardenberg (Hrsg.), Gutes Arbeiten im digitalen Zeitalter. Frankfurt/ New York: campus Verlag 2021
Alexander Ziegler, Der Aufstieg des Internet der Dinge. Wie sich Industrieunternehmen zu Tech-Unternehmen entwickeln. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus 202
Generative AI and the Future of Work: Augmentation or Automation?
Full text linkThis report examines the potential impact of Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as ChatGPT, on the future of work and, by implication, on productivity. It argues that although Generative AI is powerful, it has significant limitations and risks that require humans to remain “in the loop” not only to prevent systems from going off the rails, but to capture value. Rather than taking a deterministic view that artificial intelligence (AI) will inevitably destroy jobs, the article suggests that an analysis should start with how firms can strategically deploy these tools to gain an advantage. It asks whether “augmentation” or “simplistic automation” lies ahead. Our objective is to move beyond hype and despair.
The existing digital infrastructure has enabled AI to be adopted quickly. However, projections based solely on automating existing tasks fail to capture the complex reorganizations that are likely to happen. Firms in sectors such as professional services, materials, and pharmaceuticals seem to have particular exposure to the use of Generative AI tools. Adaptations will vary across contexts and depend greatly on who controls the decisions about deployment. Maintaining the centrality of humans is likely to prove crucial—in training systems, curating data, and assessing outputs. One question is which business strategies and public policies encourage that engagement and make it possible.
Although AI regulation debates matter, promoting social prosperity depends heavily on directly shaping the trajectory of the development and use of AI. This requires influencing the constraints and the incentives that firms face, as well as the strategic mindsets of decision makers. Which groups are engaged in the discussions and debates is of vital importance. The article recommends that, beyond the traditional policy proposals, an independent public-interest consultancy needs to be established in order to design creative business strategies that augment workers in a manner that will support, rather than hinder, social prosperity. Ultimately, avoiding a dystopian scenario might hinge on fostering new norms in which human capabilities remain essential.This research report was principally funded by the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (684 11 - “Denkfabrik Digitale Arbeitsgesellschaft”