@alexanderloth.bsky.socialBack from #AIES2026 in Malmö. Five things I took home, and how much of the week circled back to our Mitigation Paradox: experts agree on the threats of AI disinformation, but split on what to do about them. https://alexloth.com/aies-2026-wrap-up-malmoe/
@reniebird.bsky.socialWe had an #AIES2026 paper about this! ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI....
And of course, our AI Policy Summer School is an attempt to communicate the required skills to students :)
@emmharv.bsky.socialI will be presenting "Data Annotation as Measurement" at #AIES2026 in Poster Session 3 (today @ 3:15PM CEST)!
![A poster with the following content:
Data Annotation as Measurement
Emma Harvey, Allison Koenecke, Rene Kizilcec
Data annotation...
- is the augmentation of data for use in some downstream task
- is a process that is under-documented and under-interrogated
- is centered on maximizing agreement between multiple annotators
- often produces low-quality data
Through an interview study (N=10) and a literature review (N=132), we explore: How can we improve data annotation?
Determine the sources of annotation issues before addressing them:
[image of a dog mislabeled as a cat]
What’s wrong with this label? Maybe…
(A) The annotator:
- is not following instructions (error)
- is misrepresenting themselves (identity)
(B) The instructions:
- lack factual information (ambiguity)
- lack value information (subjectivity)
(C) The data instance:
- lacks necessary information (impossibility)
Use ideas from measurement theory to interrogate annotation reliability and validity:
- Move beyond agreement to ask: are repeated annotations by the same annotator consistent? (test-retest reliability)
- Clearly systematize and operationalize concepts that are being annotated so that it is possible to ask: are annotations (un)correlated with other measures of (un)related concepts? (convergent & discriminant validity)
- Formalize the checks that researchers already conduct before working with annotated data to ask: do annotations pass the “sniff test” at scale? (face validity)
- Use qualitative methods from the social sciences to ask: what are the societal impacts of using a set of annotations? (consequential validity)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:nccmqdt5i7a4kfbnclsb5slf/bafkreieukxkddwmhaliaw7kkcpcwbd2sjmjclziplffybrihki6hr3s6qe@jpeg)
@geomblog.bsky.socialA constant refrain here at #AIES2026 is "we need to get policymakers to move on the ideas we are presenting". I think that's a deep misunderstanding of the research to policy movement pipeline, and overestimates the "policy readiness" and the structural contributions of individual research papers.
@jennahgosciak.bsky.socialNew 📝paper at #AIES2026 ”A Critical Pragmatism Approach for AI Ethics: Lessons from Urban Planning Theory” with @karenlevy.bsky.social and @allisonkoe.bsky.social. 🔗: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...
@nnkennard.bsky.socialIrina Shklovski’s thought provoking keynote talked about whether common computing practices and tacit shared values might fundamentally conflict with the demands of Responsible AI 😲#aies2026
@pranav-nlp.bsky.socialToday in #AIES2026, I will talk about my journey of my PhD. What I did and what I plan to do. I highly value society's and broader community input for my work, so if you wanna chat about surveillance, come by at poster S-100!
@davidmanheim.alter.org.ilFantastic story from Stefan Larsson @lund-university.bsky.social giving the keynote today at #AIES2026
He thought he was done working on copyright law, and had moved on to AI issues - then found out that *his book on copyright* had been pirated to train LLMs via the Anthropic class-action lawsuit.
@alexanderloth.bsky.socialI wrote up a longer reflection on presenting at #AIES2026, the paper and the conversations around it on LinkedIn: lnkd.in/p/ez5yhFCz
@ashwxn.bsky.socialstop generating hypothetical scenarios and marginalized people using LLMs to study harms to skip the labor of working with real people lol
#AIES2026
@emmharv.bsky.socialI will be presenting "Context and Symmetry in Auditing: A Case Study of Skeleton Inference in Motion Capture" at #AIES2026 in Poster Session 1 (today @ 5PM CEST)!
@pettter.bsky.socialExcellent keynote by Sandra Wachter now at #AIES2026 questioning what the public is actually getting for all the benefits and subsidies that are rained upon the AI industry.
@alexanderloth.bsky.socialToday at #AIES2026 in Malmö I joined the panel on Participation, Sovereignty, and Power in AI Governance with The Mitigation Paradox, joint work with Mina Schütz, Martin Kappes and Marc-Oliver Pahl. 3 takeaways:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23302284
@aolteanu.bsky.socialA quick reminder that we should not conflate *confidence* with *expertise* -- one helps you to notice whether an output is correct while the other does not #AIES2026
@anthropunk.bsky.socialThe "E" in #AIES2026 stands for ETHICS.
So a Claude opening presentation is a bit... well... tone deaf at best.
@geomblog.bsky.socialAt the opening session for #AIES2026. And all I can think of is how the opening presentation was clearly Claude generated from the fonts and style :). Nothing wrong with that - it's a time saver - but it's a distinct aesthetic.
@uhleeeeeeeshuh.bsky.socialIf you’re at #AIES2026, catch @davidthewid.bsky.social presenting this on Wed, Oct 14 at 10:45 a.m. — and regardless, you can find the full paper here: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI.... 3/n
@uhleeeeeeeshuh.bsky.socialAre algorithm audits meaningfully fixing issues in algorithmic systems? In our paper at #AIES2026 this week, @davidthewid.bsky.social and I argue that it’s time to deprioritize algorithm audits & instead shift scrutiny to the larger systems of power in which audits sit. 1/n
@alexanderloth.bsky.socialOur #AIES2026 paper (Malmö, tomorrow): 54 experts from 21 countries agree on the threats of AI disinformation but split on the solutions. Government regulation: 30% call it most effective, 15% least effective. The Mitigation Paradox.
Preprint: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
@davidmanheim.alter.org.ilHeading to Malmo for #AIES2026, Sun-Thurs.
Looking forward to seeing people there, feel free to DM / email / etc. if you'd like to meet up!