What I think was the main ethical issue with the discussion on Monday was how individuals and society can be influenced by the manipulated data. There was a consensus on the most important and urgent ethical issue, which was privacy regarding personal information. This is because some people use personal information for commercial or political purposes. Moreover, there was a discussion about Deepfake videos, which are fake videos that people cannot really distinguish from the real videos with naked eyes. This artificial intelligence and deep learning technique have been already used for making pornographic against celebrities and politicians.

Examples above are both about how manipulated data deeply impact how we see understand and absorb fake things on the world. Based on our personal information, companies make different advertisement tailored to each personality, and politicians give different types of messages. This can be dangerous because it can be a new phase that polarizes our society, divided by those who have big data and those who don’t have access to big data.

Deepfake videos are also huge problems as well. We all know the famous fake video of Obama giving a speech but he did not actually. Even though deepfake vidoes are yet used politically as much as they are for making pornographic, as the deep learning and artificial intelligence get better every time, it is a matter of time that we might see fake videos that instigate, reproduce and spread out hatred and disinformation.

Nevertheless, there is not a substantial solution to these problems since they are uncontrollable and inevitable unless every person quit using the internet. Thus, each individual, especially those people who manage websites and portals, need to be more responsible.

Deepfake videos utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to superimpose the faces of famous people, or even ordinary folks, onto the bodies of other people in different videos. Deepfake videos appear very realistic because machine learning allows the algorithm to continuously improve the image. This technology is often used in a sinister way to incriminate people in pornographic videos or to generate visual ‘evidence’ of events that never actually happened. The open-source artificial intelligence tool, TenserFlow, has been misused as a tool for creating Deepfake videos as the program relies on machine learning and image processing.

“Deepfake technology does its own google image search and scours through social media and can, by itself, replace faces in videos.  The program improves itself independently through machine learning.  Using this tech, anyone can create fake videos including pornographic videos of just about anyone.  Also, Deepfakes can be spread rapidly considering how quickly media is consumed and reproduced online. There is another technology that lies in this same vein, such as tech that can automatically alter images, and tech that can recreate voices.  The implications of this are that we may be looking at a future where people can create photos, videos, and audio of someone doing things they never did and saying things they never said.”

Development of crafty fake videos techniques influences jurisdictive decisions in courts as well. Videos and images have been strong evidence to prove eyewitnesses, but now it came to the situation that the validity of videos and images may be skeptical. Rather, videos might need to be proved by eyewitnesses. Another problem is that, yet, there are not many experts who know well about artificial intelligence and are capable of distinguishing fake videos from the real videos.

While it is only a matter of time before fake videos keep improving their performance, research in this field is sparse and so too are the necessary tools that could help stop the perpetuation of deep fake videos. Researchers have begun to make algorithms that can make these deep fake videos more easily identified but this same technology can also further advance the creation of these videos.

Sean Lee: Third paragraph, editing, and posting

Zaria: First paragraph

Gray: Second paragraph

TJ: Fourth paragraph

Social network services (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter have a huge impact on society. SNS influenced politics, economics and our daily lives in every world. There are some countries in Europe that succeeded democratizing and SNS helped the processes. In Moldova, it cannot be denied that SNS helped to gather the crowd and fueled the flames of protests. More than 900,000 people gathered through a Twitter hashtag, but as soon as the government blocked the internet, they lost what to do and the will to fight. Two issues arose in my after reading the article.

First, should the government censure any stuff in SNS? I think there need to be some regulations to prevent sexual abuse, violence and any inhumane discriminations. However, the problem is that once the public gives the government a power to control the internet and SNS, they can do something other than what they were supposed to do in specific occasions like political protests.

Secondly, I realized that people have been overlooked the blind spot of the internet and SNS. What happens if we don’t have access to them and if this is intentional by some parties? This sounds unlikely, but it is a point to think about. People hugely rely on computers, internets and SNS, and they are definitely helpful. But at the same time, we need to know that they also have some limits. They are not something operated automatically, but instead, they are controlled and managed by someone with intentions. In the article we read, Moldovans did not know how to keep protests when the internet was blocked.

The importance of coding education has been mentioned in the last decades. I heard that learning at least one computer language is helpful no matter what major I am in college. I also read an article that the future industry will be divided into those who have A.I., and those who don’t have A.I.

Two articles about coding education in public schools well reflected these social atmospheres. Coding education led by major companies like Facebook and Google is fostered in primary and secondary education. Parents already know that learning computer programming is the key to the future, and their children should learn it to prevent from falling behind.

I believe these trends are meaningful in that coding education allows computer and programming to be the shared legacy of all people. However, as discussed in the class, the distinction between coding and programming is definite and educators are necessary to more focus on programming. Coding is more close to mechanical technique, and programming is an understanding of how coding computer language works. Richtel wrote in the New York Times that “it is not clear that teaching basic computer science in grade school will (…) foster broader creativity and logical thinking.” To promote more constructive coding education, students need to be exposed to the fundamental mechanism of coding lied upon software and applications. This is similar to the emphasis on critical thinking and debating than just mechanically solving many numbers of problems in mathematics.

<Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding>

Coding education became nationally prevalent in public schools and the grade to learn coding gets lower as times goes. Most of the parents wanted their children to be prepared for the future, and do not fall back. Some schools were teaching coding as after-school programs, some other schools were taking coding as regulatory courses and it was a major requirement for graduation. While some experts expected a positive effect of being exposed to computer science from early ages, some educators concerned that few big companies were taking too much role in coding education.
In the course of action over the years that computers have evolved in use and influence, so has their role for within society. In the time, as with its main method of use, coding. In the time of computers becoming a part of everyday lives, children are more often than not influence to learn more about them through the education system, so as to follow through with early development. However, with all other things, there is a debate on just how much influence should activities that involve a computer should be within their growing lives, without being unhealthy. Opinions vary on such, but in the end, the influence computers will have on people’s lives will not stop.

The second reading we did was the transcript of a speech given by President Obama in a weekly address. He framed coding as a skill that was necessary for the future, one that should be taught in every school. He announced pushes by his administration to fund computer science programs in elementary and high schools. The funding would go towards resources for the actual classes along with teacher training. He promoted state and local initiatives that would accompany federal promotion of computer science. President Obama presented coding as a fundamental skill for a changing economy.
Obama’s Computer Science for All initiative acknowledges that learning how to write code is necessary for the digital economy, and seeks to make it accessible to students of all ages. It builds a national coalition in an attempt to rectify disparities. By using Queens and New Orleans as examples, Obama’s choice of words indicates a desire to make these skills attainable for minority communities which have been traditionally left behind, shooting for an equal playing field.

Gabriel -> Second paragraph of the first article
Sean ->First paragraph of the first article & editing and posting
Georgia ->First paragraph of the second article
Charles -> Second paragraph of the second article