News That Caught Our Eye #54
Published on by Dane Gambrell & Angelique Casem on April 16, 2025
In the news this week: Bowling Green, Kentucky used an AI-enabled platform to gather nearly 4,000 ideas from residents about priorities to include in the city’s long-term plan; the platform’s AI tools helped to surface new areas of agreement among community members, while having a human in the loop ensured that the engagement had an understanding of the local context. José Luis Martí identifies four key considerations for transforming democratic institutions from within, while a UN report looks at how AI is transforming international development. Sofia Bosch Gomez describes how the Burnes Center for Social Change and Innovate Public Schools are co-designing an AI-powered tool with hundreds of families to make individualized education plans more accessible and understandable. Read more in this week's AI News That Caught Our Eye.
In the news this week
- AI for Governance:Smarter public institutions through machine intelligence.
- AI and Public Engagement:Bolstering participation
- AI and Problem Solving:Research, applications, technical breakthroughs
- AI and Labor:Worker rights, safety and opportunity
- AI and Public Safety:Law enforcement, disaster prevention and preparedness
- Governing AI:Setting the rules for a fast-moving technology.
AI for Governance
AI for Governance
Technology and Innovation Report 2025: Inclusive Artificial Intelligence for Development
This examines the global landscape of frontier technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, highlighting disparities in countries' readiness and capacity. It analyzes AI's impact on productivity and labor markets, presenting case studies of AI adoption in developing countries across agriculture, manufacturing, and healthcare. The report provides policy guidance for nations to strategically approach both AI adoption and development, addressing infrastructure, data, and skills. Furthermore, it explores the necessity of global collaboration to ensure AI's equitable and inclusive progress, advocating for shared digital infrastructure and open innovation.
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Why more AI researchers should collaborate with governments
“Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to transform many industries, yet its use to improve public services remains limited globally. AI-based tools could streamline access to government benefits through online chatbots or automate systems by which citizens report problems, such as potholes. Currently, scholarly advances in AI are mostly confined to academic papers and conferences, rarely translating into actionable government policies or products. This means that the expertise at universities is not used to solve real-world problems. As a No10 Innovation Fellow with the UK government and a lecturer in spatial data science, I have explored the potential of AI-driven rapid prototyping in public policy…In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, universities already possess substantial expertise in domains such as urban modelling, embedded AI and computer vision. It is crucial for government leaders and academics to work together in applying this knowledge to improve citizens’ quality of life.”
Read articleAI and Public Engagement
AI and Public Engagement
A small US city experiments with AI to find out what residents want
In Bowling Green, Kentucky, 7,890 residents—10% of the city—used an AI-powered platform, Pol.is, to shape a 25-year city plan. Participants submitted and voted on over 3,900 ideas, with popular ones including better healthcare access, more restaurants, and preserving historic buildings. Additionally, half of the ideas had an agreement rate of almost 80%, and subtopics, such as curriculum in K-12 learning, were more emphasized. The platform’s AI tools helped to surface new areas of agreement among community members while having a human in the loop ensured that the engagement had an understanding of the local context, according to a blog post published by Google’s Jigsaw: https://medium.com/jigsaw/how-one-of-the-fastest-growing-cities-in-kentucky-used-ai-to-plan-for-the-next-25-years-3b70c4fd1412
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How is AI augmenting collective intelligence for the SDGs?
“Most uses of AI in development today are based on machine learning algorithms, which improve their performance based on extracting patterns from very large training datasets. This approach is a great fit for collective intelligence projects, many of which gather or interpret large amounts of human-generated content like images and videos, crowdsourced through smartphone apps and online platforms.” This blog post highlights three ways that AI can augment and scale the intelligence of groups: improving data processing speed and scale, organizing human knowledge through topic clustering, and helping to optimize and prioritize workflows.
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AI for collective intelligence
“AI has emerged as a transformative force in society, reshaping economies, work, and everyday life. We argue that AI can not only improve short-term productivity but can also enhance a group’s collective intelligence. Specifically, AI can be employed to enhance three elements of collective intelligence: collective memory, collective attention, and collective reasoning…In this special issue of ACM Collective Intelligence on ‘AI for Collective Intelligence,’ we explore how this partnership can be harnessed by presenting a collection of diverse articles. The first article is an empirical study highlighting AI’s role in enhancing creativity—a frequently cited benefit of AI—through tools like chatbots and large language models (LLMs). The second article showcases practical applications of how AI can be leveraged to accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), how AI can help tackle problems that are collective in nature, and to scale community-led deliberation. These discussions aim to reveal how AI, in tandem with human effort, can drive innovative solutions and creative processes that benefit humanity at large.”
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Transforming democracy from within: A Closer Look at Brazil’s Citizen Engagement Initiatives in Parliament - Part 1
“Brazil’s Senate stands as a powerful example of how parliaments can use technology to make citizen engagement in lawmaking more accessible and meaningful. But to truly transform democracy from within, these innovations must be guided by clear ends and an understanding that participation is a limited resource. In this post – the first in a two-part analysis – Pompeu Fabra University professor José Luis Martí identifies four pillars of democratic innovation that may provide crucial guidance in evaluating actual public initiatives, such as those implemented in Brazil: the importance of the ends of participation, the need for an economy of participation, the case for worshipping citizen engagement, and the centrality of deliberation.”
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Transforming democracy from within: A Closer Look at Brazil’s Citizen Engagement Initiatives in Parliament - Part 2
Pompeu Fabra University professor José Luis Martí makes the case for worshipping citizen participation and for giving deliberation the central role it deserves in our democracies today. Martí argues that while transforming our democratic institutions from within is both necessary and urgent, it is not an easy task.
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Designing AI With Communities: the AIEP Project
Together with hundreds of families, the Burnes Center for Social Change and Innovate Public Schools are co-designing an AI-powered tool designed to empower families to better understand and engage with their child’s individualized education plan (IEP). This free, open-source platform aims to eliminate key barriers families face when engaging with IEPs, which are often lengthy and packed with specialized educational jargon, making them challenging to understand. By integrating community perspectives into the heart of the platform's technological design, the project aims to ensure that the AI tool reflects and serves the needs, values, and aspirations of the people who will use it.
Read articleAI and Problem Solving
AI and Problem Solving
The uneven reach of the state: Using machine learning to map local state presence
“The ability of states to exercise authority often varies considerably within their borders, yet we lack reliable empirical measures of the uneven reach of states. In this paper, we develop a methodology to predict state presence at granular spatial resolutions and demonstrate the approach using data from Sub-Saharan Africa. We link a range of indicators of state presence, e.g., infrastructural data, with geolocated survey data of residents’ experiences with subnational governance. Then, we employ a machine learning algorithm that learns how the input variables relate to experienced state presence and extrapolates the predictions to all of Sub-Saharan Africa. We validate the predicted measure through a range of tests and document how local state presence influences development outcomes.” Read a summary of the study here: https://voxdev.org/topic/methods-measurement/uneven-reach-state-using-machine-learning-map-local-state-presence
Read articleAI and Labor
AI and Labor
Measuring Human Leadership Skills with AI Agents
“We show that leadership skill with AI agents predicts leadership skill with human groups. In a large pre-registered lab experiment, human leaders worked with AI agents to solve problems. Their performance on this ‘AI leadership test’ was strongly correlated with their causal impact as leaders of human teams, which is estimated by repeatedly randomly assigning leaders to groups of human followers and measuring team performance. Successful leaders of both humans and AI agents ask more questions and engage in more conversational turn-taking; they score higher on measures of social intelligence, fluid intelligence, and decision-making skill, but do not differ in gender, age, ethnicity or education. Our findings indicate that AI agents can be effective proxies for human participants in social experiments, which greatly simplifies the measurement of leadership and teamwork skills”.
Read articleAI and Public Safety
AI and Public Safety
Google Is Helping the Trump Administration Deploy AI Along the Mexican Border
“U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning to modernize older video surveillance towers in Arizona that provide the agency an unblinking view of the border. A key part of the effort is adding machine-learning capabilities to CBP cameras, allowing the agency to automatically detect humans and vehicles as they approach the border without continuous monitoring by humans. CBP is purchasing computer vision powers from two vendors, IBM and Equitus. Google, the documents show, will play a critical role stitching those services together by operating a central repository for video surveillance data.”
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The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI
This article reports the findings from an investigation into Clearview AI, the facial recognition technology widely used by ICE and the FBI: “This story, based on interviews with insiders and thousands of newly obtained emails, texts, and other records, including internal ICE communications, provides the fullest account to date of the extent of the company’s far-right origins and of the implementation of its facial recognition technology within the federal government’s immigration enforcement apparatus. It reveals how [co-founder] Ton-That, who obsessed over race, IQ, and hierarchy, solicited input from eugenicists and right-wing extremists while building Clearview, and how, from the outset, he and his associates discussed deploying the tech against immigrants, people of color, and the political left. All told, this new reporting paints a chilling portrait of an ideologically driven company whose powerful surveillance technology is now in the hands of the Trump administration, as it bulldozes democratic institutions and executes an authoritarian takeover.”
Read articleGoverning AI
Governing AI
Ireland's privacy regulator is investigating X's use of public data to train Grok
“Ireland's data privacy regulator is investigating Elon Musk's X. The country's Data Protection Commission (DPC) said that it's opening an inquiry into the social platform's use of European users' public posts to train its Grok AI chatbot. In this case, Ireland handles EU regulation enforcement because X's European headquarters are in Dublin. The DPC said it will probe ‘the processing of personal data comprised in publicly-accessible posts posted on the 'X' social media platform by EU/EEA users.’ Under Europe's General Data Protection Regulation rules, Ireland has the legal muscle to fine X up to four percent of its global revenue. ‘The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether this personal data was lawfully processed in order to train the Grok LLMs,’ Ireland's DPC said.”
Read articleGoverning AI
Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case
“A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on e-books without permission. The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense ‘a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.’ ‘The use of copyrighted works to train generative models is not ‘transformative,’ because using works for that purpose is not relevantly different from using them to educate human authors, which is a principal original purpose of all of [authors’] works,’ reads the brief. ‘That training use is also not ‘transformative’ because its purpose is to enable the creation of works that compete with the copied works in the same markets – a purpose that, when pursued by a for-profit company like Meta, also makes the use undeniably commercial.”
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