From propaganda to perception: AI that thinks like us

As propaganda gets more sophisticated and news consumption gets faster, I wondered: how can we help people slow down and think more critically? In this talk, I'll share insights from my research on designing an AI tool that detects propaganda and explains it to the reader in real time. Along the way, my research team encountered unexpected challenges - between speed and reflection, automation and agency, trust and transparency. It's not about fixing the way people read, it's about designing technology to support their thinking. What we found challenged our assumptions about AI and ourselves.

In his talk, Edy Portmann presents the way of a fuzzy thinker towards a computing with words and perceptions. Fuzzy logic is a way of doing science without math, it’s a branch of explainable artificial intelligence that tries to make computer systems think the way humans do and not the other way round. Thereby, fuzzy logic provides a natural gateway to move from a sole measurement-based to a perception-based computer science. In the end, this will enable more resilient tech innovations.