Description
One of the key growing concerns in Canada and around the globe is that the generative AI (GenAI) is posing a real and significant existential risk to democratic discourse and, as a result, to democratic societies. This project is set to study how much and why Canadians are vulnerable to the GenAI interference in digital democratic discourses, and investigate advances in technology to make Canadians less vulnerable. In particular, the project focuses on studying the ability of AI-driven chatbots to masquerade as humans on digital interactive public forums, and investigating technological countermeasures to mitigate this risk. To understand this vulnerability thoroughly, the project will explore the interplay between the long-term user characteristics and other factors, such as user transient traits/circumstances, characteristics of the chatbots, the topic sensitivity, as well as the degree of topics’ importance/criticality for the participants. Based on the above findings, the researchers will propose and evaluate ways of mitigating the risk. Human-centric in nature, the project will involve Canadian participants from a wide range of demographics, including but not limited to indigenous populations, recent immigrants, as well as diverse cultural backgrounds and age, financially vulnerable demographic groups, non-urban populations, diverse genders.
Researchers
Project co-leads: Prof. Konstantin Beznosov (ECE), Prof. Cristina Conati (CS)
Students:
- Venkata Alekhya Kusam, Masters student, Department of Computer Science
- Arthur Sanglier, Summer intern at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), CESI Graduate School of Engineering, France
Related Publications
To be provided
Video
To be provided
Acknowledgements
This research is made possible in part through the support of
- The National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC) and the Government of Canada (CSIN)
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)