People now regularly use, manage and produce digital information in work and leisure contexts as well as in social and political settings, e.g., to form opinions and to act on those opinions. As more and more human activities include digital components or completely shift to the digital realm, digital sovereignty becomes increasingly important. Digital sovereignty as a concept refers to being able to understand how personal data is being processed, by whom and what potential implications this may have on a person sharing their data. In addition, it includes being able to control how personal data is shared and with whom.
In the past, key challenges for realising digital sovereignty on an individual level included low literacy (e.g., in terms of assessing sources, managing information overload or understanding the complex processes producing information) and algorithmic biases (e.g., in terms of prioritising advertisement revenues over providing useful information or creating filter bubbles). With the recent breakthrough in generative AI/LLM, this difficult situation can potentially deteriorate much further as information can now be generated instantly that does not correspond to the actual state of the real world but is indistinguishable from information truthfully representing that state. For example, photographs, videos or texts can be generated that convincingly depict or describe events that never took place. The same applies in principle for data, e.g., generated measurements that cannot be easily distinguished from actual sensor measurements.
The goal of this seminar is to explore and discuss the current state of research with respect to digital sovereignty, generative AI and media that have a spatiotemporal component, e.g. photographs or videos with spatiotemporal metadata or earth observation data. Participants will read current literature from related fields, present selected papers during the block-mode teaching week in February and discuss ideas/approaches to tackle the problems we identify during the seminar.
Tasks to complete by the students:
- read several papers on digital sovereignty, generative AI for media creation and related fields
- present a paper in the area during the seminar (Prüfungsleistung/graded course work)
- participate in discussions (Studienleistung/non-graded course work)
- present outcome of group workshop (Studienleistung/non-graded course work)
- write individual report on presented paper and group workshops outcome (Prüfungsleistung/graded course work)
The course will be offered as a block-mode event during one week in February and is worth 5 credit points.
- Lehrende/r: Christian Kray