The AI Act and the risks posed by generative AI models

This position paper presents work in progress on the foundation of the not yet finalized AI Act and discusses whether the proposed AI Act has the resources to adequately identify and mitigate the risks posed by generative AI models like LLMs. All the details of AI Act are not yet decided but after the EU Council reached a consensus on a revised version of proposal issued by the Commission, the main principles of this risk-based model of regulation are in place. We argue that the methods for risk identification and mitigation in the act, while adequate to the management of many risks emerging from the use of AI systems, are not suitable for the management of all risks emerging from generative AI systems like LLMspublishedVersio

The meaning of links: On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change

This article explores the potential and challenges of using hyperlinks as data through a study of polarization in English language blogs about climate change. The purpose of this research is to provide an interpretation of the meaning of the hyperlinks in climate change blogs by coding the functions that the links perform in the given blog posts. Beginning with a set of more than 500,000 blog posts about climate change, we focus on bloggers who actively link to highly visible sources that advocate, respectively, the denial or acceptance of the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change. We find that the bloggers in our sample predominantly link to sources that they agree with and that, if they link to a source with different opinions, the link is part of negative criticism of the targeted source. We argue that, by considering the functions of the links in the blog posts, we obtain a more nuanced understanding of the extent to which the discussion in the blogs is polarized.publishedVersio

Polarisation or just differences in opinion: How and why Facebook users disagree about Greta Thunberg

To what extent was Greta Thunberg a ‘polarizing figure’ on Facebook, in the period when she received the most extensive media attention? The paper analyses seven months of discussion concerning Thunberg and her message of intergenerational climate justice, using all relevant posts on public Facebook pages in Germany, Sweden, and the UK. We find that there are many similarities in the attitudes expressed and topics discussed on Facebook in the three countries; however, there are also some striking differences in the levels of polarisation. This comparative study provides evidence that the level of polarisation around these topics on Facebook is very low in Sweden and the UK, but high in Germany. In Germany, a group of political actors stand out as particularly polarising, and, in contrast to the other two countries, the topic of intergeneration justice, the core of Thunberg’s message, is almost absent from the German Facebook discourse. The study shows that Thunberg was not in general a polarising figure in the three European countries and that neither the affordances offered by the platform nor features of her person, message, or activism explain the observed polarisation around Thunberg on Facebook.publishedVersio

The Impact of Climate Change on Lifestyle Journalism

ABSTRACT How do journalists conceive of covering climate change from a lifestyle perspective? Do they think reporting on climate and lifestyle should provide their audiences with advice and solutions for how to make climate friendly choices? We address these questions through a survey among Norwegian journalists and editors with questions about their experience with reporting on climate and lifestyles, their evaluation of the importance of journalism on climate and lifestyle, and what role they see for constructive journalism in the coverage of climate and lifestyle issues. We provide evidence that issues of climate change and lifestyles to some extent are covered by journalists within a range of journalistic beats reflecting that climate change affects lifestyle choices in complex ways. A central idea in our argument is that there is a close conceptual connection between lifestyle journalism and constructive journalism, and we show that there is a systematic relationship between evaluations of the importance of lifestyle journalism and of the role constructive journalism should have in the coverage of climate and lifestyles. We also chart the nature and extent of the disagreement around the role of constructive journalism in the coverage of this issue.publishedVersio

Toward ‘Cultures of Engagement’? An exploratory comparison of engagement patterns on Facebook news posts

Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts (n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed over 69 million interactions across three metrics of engagement (i.e. comments, likes, and shares). More concretely, we investigate whether the patterns of engagement follow distinct patterns across national boundaries and type of outlet ownership. While we are skeptical of metrics of engagement as markers of specific cultures of engagement, our results show that there are clear differences in how readers engage with news posts depending on the country of origin and whether they are fully state-owned or private-owned outlets.publishedVersio

The Meaning of Links: On the interpretation of hyperlinks in the study of polarization in blogging about climate change

Abstract This article explores the potential and challenges of using hyperlinks as data through a study of polarization in English language blogs about climate change. The purpose of this research is to provide an interpretation of the meaning of the hyperlinks in climate change blogs by coding the functions that the links perform in the given blog posts. Beginning with a set of more than 500,000 blog posts about climate change, we focus on bloggers who actively link to highly visible sources that advocate, respectively, the denial or acceptance of the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change. We find that the bloggers in our sample predominantly link to sources that they agree with and that, if they link to a source with different opinions, the link is part of negative criticism of the targeted source. We argue that, by considering the functions of the links in the blog posts, we obtain a more nuanced understanding of the extent to which the discussion in the blogs is polarized.</jats:p