Navigating Dialectal Bias and Ethical Complexities in Levantine Arabic Hate Speech Detection

Social media platforms have become central to global communication, yet they also facilitate the spread of hate speech. For underrepresented dialects like Levantine Arabic, detecting hate speech presents unique cultural, ethical, and linguistic challenges. This paper explores the complex sociopolitical and linguistic landscape of Levantine Arabic and critically examines the limitations of current datasets used in hate speech detection. We highlight the scarcity of publicly available, diverse datasets and analyze the consequences of dialectal bias within existing resources. By emphasizing the need for culturally and contextually informed natural language processing (NLP) tools, we advocate for a more nuanced and inclusive approach to hate speech detection in the Arab world.

Measuring the Success of Diffusion Models at Imitating Human Artists

Modern diffusion models have set the state-of-the-art in AI image generation. Their success is due, in part, to training on Internet-scale data which often includes copyrighted work. This prompts questions about the extent to which these models learn from, imitate, or copy the work of human artists. This work suggests that tying copyright liability to the capabilities of the model may be useful given the evolving ecosystem of generative models. Specifically, much of the legal analysis of copyright and generative systems focuses on the use of protected data for training. As a result, the connections between data, training, and the system are often obscured. In our approach, we consider simple image classification techniques to measure a model's ability to imitate specific artists. Specifically, we use Contrastive Language-Image Pretrained (CLIP) encoders to classify images in a zero-shot fashion. Our process first prompts a model to imitate a specific artist. Then, we test whether CLIP can be used to reclassify the artist (or the artist's work) from the imitation. If these tests match the imitation back to the original artist, this suggests the model can imitate that artist's expression. Our approach is simple and quantitative. Furthermore, it uses standard techniques and does not require additional training. We demonstrate our approach with an audit of Stable Diffusion's capacity to imitate 70 professional digital artists with copyrighted work online. When Stable Diffusion is prompted to imitate an artist from this set, we find that the artist can be identified from the imitation with an average accuracy of 81.0%. Finally, we also show that a sample of the artist's work can be matched to these imitation images with a high degree of statistical reliability. Overall, these results suggest that Stable Diffusion is broadly successful at imitating individual human artists.

Regulating Facial Processing Technologies: Tensions Between Legal and Technical Considerations in the Application of Illinois BIPA

Harms resulting from the development and deployment of facial processing technologies (FPT) have been met with increasing controversy. Several states and cities in the U.S. have banned the use of facial recognition by law enforcement and governments, but FPT are still being developed and used in a wide variety of contexts where they primarily are regulated by state biometric information privacy laws. Among these laws, the 2008 Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has generated a significant amount of litigation. Yet, with most BIPA lawsuits reaching settlements before there have been meaningful clarifications of relevant technical intricacies and legal definitions, there remains a great degree of uncertainty as to how exactly this law applies to FPT. What we have found through applications of BIPA in FPT litigation so far, however, points to potential disconnects between technical and legal communities. This paper analyzes what we know based on BIPA court proceedings and highlights these points of tension: areas where the technical operationalization of BIPA may create unintended and undesirable incentives for FPT development, as well as areas where BIPA litigation can bring to light the limitations of solely technical methods in achieving legal privacy values. These factors are relevant for (i) reasoning about biometric information privacy laws as a governing mechanism for FPT, (ii) assessing the potential harms of FPT, and (iii) providing incentives for the mitigation of these harms. By illuminating these considerations, we hope to empower courts and lawmakers to take a more nuanced approach to regulating FPT and developers to better understand privacy values in the current U.S. legal landscape.

Ethical Dilemmas of Strategic Coalitions

A coalition of agents, or a single agent, has an ethical dilemma between several statements if each joint action of the coalition forces at least one specific statement among them to be true. For example, any action in the trolley dilemma forces one specific group of people to die. In many cases, agents face ethical dilemmas because they are restricted in the amount of the resources they are ready to sacrifice to overcome the dilemma. The paper presents a sound and complete modal logical system that describes properties of dilemmas for a given limit on a sacrifice.