The collaboration will focus on online protection of artistic freedom 

Alicante, 10 of July 2023 The ELLIS Alicante Foundation in Spain and the Don’t Delete Art initiative in the USA have joined forces to foster the responsible development of trustworthy, human-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the context of art. Both institutions have pledged to give visibility to the negative societal implications of today’s AI systems, particularly content moderation algorithms used in social media platforms.

ELLIS Alicante (ELLIS for European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) is a non-profit foundation working on ethical and responsible AI research for social good. Don’t Delete Art is a collaborative project bringing together the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Art & Culture Advocacy Program (USA), PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection (USA), Freemuse (DK) and individual artist-activists. The project advocates for the freedom of artistic expression online.

The first stage of collaboration focuses on analyzing the impact and scope of art censorship by content moderation algorithms on social media and on developing potential solutions in support of artistic freedom (https://ellisalicante.org/censorship).

This international alliance is based on open dialogue and the shared vision of the need for the responsible and ethical development of AI systems that place human rights at their center.

Dr. Oliver, Director of ELLIS Alicante, emphasized that “serving, protecting, and fostering fundamental human rights should always be at the core when developing and deploying AI systems.” She highlighted that “At ELLIS Alicante, we are extremely proud of our growing network of international collaborators. Working together for the common good is the best way to drive and achieve positive societal change. We are tremendously excited about this new alliance with Don’t Delete Art, whose expertise on art censorship will certainly strengthen our research on this topic. We also plan to engage in joint outreach activities to spread the word and gather support globally.”

Elizabeth Larison, Director of NCAC’s Arts & Culture Advocacy Program and DDA collaborator added, “Social media companies are well aware of the shortcomings of the existing AI tools they use to enforce content moderation policies, but they have little financial incentive to improve them in order to protect access to art posted on their platforms. We are heartened by the mission of ELLIS Alicante to develop better tools to help identify images within their artistic context. We believe this collaboration will be meaningful in the development of new standards for the field.”

About ELLIS Alicante | www.ellisalicante.org/ia
ELLIS Alicante is a non-for-profit foundation focused on ethical Artificial Intelligence (IA) research in the area of the relationship between people and intelligent systems. Our name, The Institute of Human-Centered AI, defines what and how we want to play our role in this 21st century society: we firmly believe in the power of technology as a generator of progress and universal well-being. We aim to be the European and world benchmark for AI research by and for people and are the only ELLIS unit dedicated exclusively to this area. We are part of the European network of excellence in Artificial Intelligence ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems – www.ellis.eu). We are the only Spanish ELLIS Unit, the only one created from scratch, with the spirit of a scientific startup, the only one devoted exclusively to this research area. At ELLIS Alicante, we address three areas of fundamental research: 1) AI that understands us; 2) AI that interacts with us; 3) AI that we trust.

ELLIS Alicante is led by Dr. Nuria Oliver (www.nuriaoliver.com), a world renown AI expert who is devoting her scientific work to AI for Social Good.

ELLIS Alicante was launched thanks to the support of the Generalitat Valenciana and is funded by various public and private institutions, among which the Banco Sabadell Foundation stands out as its main collaborator. Our headquarters are located at the Alicante Science Park (www.uaparc.es/en) in the University of Alicante (www.ua.es/en) (Alicante, Spain).

Twitter | @ELLISAlicante

LinkedIn | https://es.linkedin.com/company/ellisalicante

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