‘Sustainability: The use of AI must be assessed with the goal of mitigating environmental and social risks and enhancing CERN's positive impact in relation to society and the environment.’ [1]
‘CERN uses 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually. That’s enough power to fuel 300,000 homes for a year in the United Kingdom.’ [2]
I think AI is the least of their problems, seeing as they burn a lot of trees for the sake of largely impractical pure knowledge.
What I find interesting is the implicit priorisation: explainability, (human) accountability, lawfulness, fairness, safety, sustainability, data privacy and non-military use.
It is a organisation wide document of "General principles", how could it possibly have something more specific to say that about the inherently context specific trade-offs of each specific use of AI?
You don't even need to go as far as saying someone didn't follow the policy, you can just say you need to review the policies. That way, conveniently enough, nobody is really ever at fault!
Organizations above a certain size absolutely cannot help themselves but publish this stuff. It is the work of senior middle managers. Ark Fleet Ship B.
I work in a corporate setting that has been working on a "strategy rebrand" for over a year now and despite numerous meeting, endless powerpoint, and god knows how much money to consultants, I still have no idea what any of this has to do with my work.
Human oversight: The use of AI must always remain under human control. Its functioning and outputs must be consistently and critically assessed and validated by a human.
Quite. One would hope, though, that it would be clear to prestigious scientific research organizations in particular, just like everything else related to source criticism and proper academic conduct.
Sure, but the way you maintain this standard is by codifying rules that are distinct from the "lower" practices you find elsewhere.
In other words, because of the huge DOGE clusterfuck demonstrated how horrible practices people will actually enact, you need to put this into the principles.
Someone's inputs is someone else's outputs, I don't think you have spotted an interesting gap. Certainly just looking at the dials will do for monitoring functioning, but falls well short of validating the system performance.
The real interesting thing is how does that principle interplay with their pillars and goals i.e. if the goal is to "optimize workflow and resource usage" then having a human in the loop at all points might limit or fully erode this ambition. Obviously it not that black and white, certain tasks could be fully autonomous where others require human validation and you could be net positive - but - this challenge is not exclusive to CERN that's for sure.
It's still just a platitude. Being somewhat critical is still giving some implicit trust. If you didn't give it any trust at all, you wouldn't use it at all! So they endorse trusting it is my read, exactly the opposite of what they appear to say!
It's funny how many official policies leave me thinking that it's a corporate cover-your-ass policy and if they really meant it they would have found a much stronger and plainer way to say it
"You can use AI but you are responsible for and must validate its output" is a completely reasonable and coherent policy. I'm sure they stated exactly what they intended to.
If you have a program that looks at CCTV footage and IDs animals that go by.. is a human supposed to validate every single output? How about if it's thousands of hours of footage?
I think parent comment is right. It's just a platitude for administrators to cover their backs and it doesn't hold to actual usecases
That doesn't follow. Say you write a proof for a something I request, I can then check that proof. That doesn't mean I don't derive any value from being given the proof. A lack of trust does not imply no use.
In such scientific environment, There are gentlemen agreements about many things that boils down to "Don't be an asshole" or "Be considerate of the others" with some hard requirements at this or that point for things that are very serious.
What's so special about military research or AI that the two can't be done together even though the organization is not in principle opposed to either?
CERN is in principle opposed to military research. That and stuff like lawfulness, fairness, sustainability, privacy are just general CERN principles restated for fluff.
> CERN’s convention states: “The Organization shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available.”
CERN was founded after WW2 in Europe, and like all major European institutions founded at the time, it was meant to be a peaceful institution.
This corporate crap makes me want to puke. It is a consequence of the forced bureaucracy from European regulations, particularly the EU AI act which is not well thought out and actively adds liability and risk to anyone on the continent touching AI including old school methods such as bank credit scoring systems.
The content is corporate. The EU AI Act is extra judicial. You don't have to be in the EU to adopt this very set of "AI Principles", but if you don't, you carry liability.
‘CERN uses 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually. That’s enough power to fuel 300,000 homes for a year in the United Kingdom.’ [2]
I think AI is the least of their problems, seeing as they burn a lot of trees for the sake of largely impractical pure knowledge.
[1] https://home.web.cern.ch/news/official-news/knowledge-sharin... [2] https://home.cern/science/engineering/powering-cern
I work in a corporate setting that has been working on a "strategy rebrand" for over a year now and despite numerous meeting, endless powerpoint, and god knows how much money to consultants, I still have no idea what any of this has to do with my work.
In other words, because of the huge DOGE clusterfuck demonstrated how horrible practices people will actually enact, you need to put this into the principles.
And with testing and other services, I guess human oversight can be reduced to _looking at the dials_ for the green and red lights?
It's funny how many official policies leave me thinking that it's a corporate cover-your-ass policy and if they really meant it they would have found a much stronger and plainer way to say it
I think parent comment is right. It's just a platitude for administrators to cover their backs and it doesn't hold to actual usecases
They endorse limited trust, not exactly a foreign concept to anyone who's taken a closer look at an older loaf of bread before cutting a slice to eat.
CERN was founded after WW2 in Europe, and like all major European institutions founded at the time, it was meant to be a peaceful institution.
But at least they make everything public knowledge, instead of keeping it secret and only selling it to one nation.