Dai Siyuan: Improving the public's private intelligence literacy can establish trust in algorithmic technology

Zhongxin Jingwei, December 21 (Zhang Yanzheng) Recently, the Department of Sociology of the School of Social Sciences of Tsinghua University and the Faculty of Chinese Academy of Sciences- Tsinghua University Center for Collaborative Development of Science and Society hosted a seminar on "Ethical Positions, Algorithm Design and Corporate Social Responsibility". Dai Siyuan, an assistant researcher at the School of Social Sciences at Tsinghua University, pointed out at the seminar that improving the public's dedicated intelligence literacy can build trust in algorithm technology.

Dai Siyuan, assistant researcher at the School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University. Source: Courtesy of the organizer

The Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China was officially implemented on November 1, 2021, ensuring digital security and information access norms from the institutional level. But can we solve the current phenomenon of digital theft or digital misuse once and for all? Dai Siyuan believes that it is also necessary to understand the formation mechanism of privacy concerns behind digital security, that is, the comprehensive impact of the formation of artificial intelligence literacy and the concerns about the use of smart products in the context of the times.

What is AI Literacy? Dai Siyuan pointed out that it can be defined as a new standard for the phenomenon of the digital divide, the early digital divide is a matter of intervention in digital opportunities, but with the continuous development of artificial intelligence products, artificial intelligence literacy objectively constitutes a new digital divide in the current intelligent era.

"Artificial intelligence problem, we disassemble it into general intelligence literacy and special intelligence literacy, universal intelligence literacy is people's service consumption ability for product use; special intelligence literacy is artificial intelligence technology research and development and production capabilities." Dai Siyuan said that while discussing AI literacy, it should be necessary to further consider personal cognitive factors, such as privacy awareness and technology trust. The former is the internal demand standard for privacy protection of individuals, and the latter reflects the quality evaluation of the level of personal privacy protection in the current external artificial intelligence technology environment.

In Dai Siyuan's view, universal intelligence literacy may directly increase information privacy concerns, which is due to the improvement of personal privacy awareness; while dedicated intelligence literacy may have a easing effect on information privacy concerns because it comes from technical trust.

In order to explore individuals' concerns about information privacy, Dai Siyuan's team modeled the data and collected data from 4300 respondents. The data results show that universal intelligence literacy directly increases the level of information privacy concerns, and privacy awareness plays a significant intermediary role in it. Dedicated intelligence literacy significantly reduces information privacy concerns, with technology trust playing an important mediating role.

Dai Siyuan believes that with the continuous promotion of smart products, personal general intelligence literacy is a learning process, objectively giving privacy cognition and other intermediary effects, and finally making information privacy concerns more and more extensive social phenomena, but "unwinding the bell also needs to be tied to the ringer", special intelligence literacy can solve the problems caused by general intelligence literacy, it has a very obvious role in alleviating information privacy concerns, this role comes from people's trust in technology.

"In other words, to alleviate information privacy concerns, it is imperative for dedicated intelligence literacy to be popularized in the whole society." Dai Siyuan said that professional technology companies can further open up doubts about the black box of technology to the public, so that more people can understand the professional knowledge such as algorithms. "At the same time, we should also establish a social co-governance pattern of artificial intelligence technology governance and application and information privacy protection, popularize algorithm expertise to the public, and improve their technical trust in smart products." (Zhongxin Jingwei APP)

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