Laurence Devillers, for an ethics of artificial intelligence

Professor Laurence Devillers © CC.4.0 / Olivier Ezratty

Text by: Agnès Rougier

4 min

Break stereotypes, teach machines to hear the nuances of speech, bring ethics into the design of artificial intelligences.

These themes are at the heart of the research of Laurence Devillers, professor of Artificial Intelligence at Sorbonne University.

She is one of the guests of the RFI morning, this Monday, March 8, on the occasion of International Women's Rights Day, which honors women scientists.

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On the one hand the machines, the artificial intelligences, on the other the richness and the subtlety of the word, of the voice whose prosody tells the story of culture, age, emotions or health.

These are the two themes that Laurence Devillers has combined since her thesis in computer science on speech recognition in 1992. The scientist was one of the first to work on

affective computing

, the study and development of systems having the ability to recognize, express and model human emotions.

Technophile, Laurence Devillers' interest, at the crossroads of linguistics and robotics, led her to question the ethical dimension of the machines with which we interact and to create the

Human-Machine Affective Interaction & Ethics

chair

, at LIMSI - the computer laboratory for mechanics and engineering sciences of the CNRS.

Robot ethics

The machines developed to interact with humans, as a health monitoring tool, for example, do not take into account the diversity of audiences, nor the richness of the emotions that weight the discourse: “T hese

machines are dramatically simple (…) today “hui, we are making very standardized systems, we are playing sorcerer's apprentices

 ” replies Laurence Devillers.

These machines also reflect the stereotypes of their designers: in

deep learning

- the machine learning of artificial intelligences - 80% of coders are men, but 80% of conversational agents have female voices (Alexa, Siri, etc.).

Laurence Devillers asks: "

If all these objects that are at our disposal 24 hours a day are represented by women, if all sex robots are feminized, what does that mean about the representation of women knowing that they are very few in this research and in these companies?

 "

The role of researchers: be vigilant

Laurence Devillers is interested in “nudge” - a method developed to influence the individual by indirect suggestions, more effective than coercion *.

But behind Google Home and other connected objects: " 

there is an idea of ​​manipulation (...) through these machines, we can amplify this phenomenon 

" she declares.

And his experiments have shown that, in a game designed to measure altruism, children are more likely to change their minds under the influence of a robot.

For Laurence Devillers, designers must think about the long-term effects, “ 

there is a real risk on these machines if they are not controlled from the design stage, the corpus must be balanced, have as many men as women, in particular

".

We must, she says, build a continuous ethic, as we learn, control the data and evaluate the behavior of systems: “ 

our role as researchers is to be vigilant (... ) wonder what it is going to be used for

 ”.

Hence the researcher's participation in several French and international ethics committees, for the development of sustainable, transparent AIs centered on human values.

* For example: when booking a hotel room via the internet, the mention " 

10 other people are viewing the ad 

" prompts you to book the room without delay.

► Find out more

  • National digital ethics pilot committee (CNPEN) 

  • Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI)

  • Human-Machine Affective Interaction & Ethics

  • Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Digital Sciences (LIMSI)

► 

Publications by Laurence Devillers

  • Emotional robots, Health, surveillance, sexuality ...: and ethics in all this?

    / 2020 / Observatory editions

  • Artificial intelligence, investigation of technologies that change our lives / 2018 / Flammarion editions

  • Robots and men / 2017 / Plon editions

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