Machine ‘Unlearning’ Helps Generative AI ‘Forget’ Copyright-Protected and Violent Content; UT News, The University of Texas at Austin, May 21, 2024

 UT News, The University of Texas at Austin ; Machine ‘Unlearning’ Helps Generative AI ‘Forget’ Copyright-Protected and Violent Content

"When people learn things they should not know, getting them to forget that information can be tough. This is also true of rapidly growing artificial intelligence programs that are trained to think as we do, and it has become a problem as they run into challenges based on the use of copyright-protected material and privacy issues.

To respond to this challenge, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed what they believe is the first “machine unlearning” method applied to image-based generative AI. This method offers the ability to look under the hood and actively block and remove any violent images or copyrighted works without losing the rest of the information in the model.

“When you train these models on such massive data sets, you’re bound to include some data that is undesirable,” said Radu Marculescu, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the leaders on the project. “Previously, the only way to remove problematic content was to scrap everything, start anew, manually take out all that data and retrain the model. Our approach offers the opportunity to do this without having to retrain the model from scratch.”"

UT computer science adding ethics courses to curriculum; KXAN, March 5, 2018

Alyssa Goard, KXAN; UT computer science adding ethics courses to curriculum

"Barbary Brunner, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, believes that what these ethics courses at UT are “a really valuable thing.” She explained that as companies in the tech world search for new ways to disrupt old ideas, it’s important to look at the human implications of what they’re setting out to do.

“This may be where the university leads the industry and the industry wakes up and says, ‘Wow that’s really smart,'” Brunner said. “For Texas to become a real tech powerhouse– which I think it can become — it needs to engage in the same sort of collaboration between higher education and the technology community that you see in California, that you see in the Seattle area.”

Brunner hasn’t heard many overarching discussions of ethics within the Austin tech world, but knows that individual discussions about ethics are going on at many companies, especially those related to security and artificial intelligence.

In the long run she thinks that ethics training may become one of many qualities tech companies look for in the recent graduates they hire."