"[...] this report aims to further explore the way in which AI technologies as they currently stand impact peace and conflict, and what methods might be used to mitigate their adverse effects - through the development of better tools and the inclusion of peace and conflict considerations in AI gover ... nance frameworks. The report presents the following findings: 1. AI is a driver of disinformation which adversely impacts peacebuilding efforts. 2. There are several ways to mitigate AI-powered disinformation. 3. AI can also be used to promote peacebuilding, although these mechanisms are still in their early stages. In relation to these findings, the report proposes the following recommendations: 1. More funding and support should be provided to civil society organizations’ efforts to expand media literacy and fact-checking initiatives using AI tools to enhance capabilities. 2. Governments need to work with civil society to develop and implement comprehensive, transparent legal frameworks combating disinformation. These legislative measures need to support digital and media literacy campaigns and fact-checking organizations. 3. Social media companies need to expand investment and research into understanding local information environments, so they can better identify and respond to instances of disinformation in all contexts in which they operate and enhance transparency. 4. Peacebuilding organizations need to carefully consider local media ecosystems and information environments when conducting conflict analyses, and factor these dynamics into their projects’ frameworks. Currently, disinformation exacerbates existing grievances and polarization, can act as a trigger for violence, leads individuals to make decisions based on false information, and creates or intensifies mistrust of institutions and international peacebuilding efforts. The efforts of journalists and civil society organizations to combat these effects, primarily through media literacy initiatives and factchecking, cannot keep up with the scope and scale of ‘fake news.’ Generative AI will increase the rate at which false content is produced and disseminated, and the quality or ‘believability’ of such content. Governments, civil society, and social media companies must work in tandem to combat the spread of disinformation and the impact it can have on peacebuilding efforts and security in sub-Saharan Africa." (Executive summary) more

"Scholarly work addressing the drivers of violent conflict predominantly focus on macro-level factors, often surrounding social group-specific grievances relating to access to power, justice, security, services, land, and resources. Recent work identifies these factors of risk and their heightened r ... isk during shocks, such as a natural disaster or significant economic adjustment. What we know little about is the role played by influential actors in mobilising people towards or away from violence during such episodes. We hypothesise that influential actors’ language indicates their intent towards or away from violence. Much work has been done to identify what constitutes hostile vernacular in political systems prone to violence, however, it has not considered the language of specific influential actors. Our methodology targeting this knowledge gap employs a suite of third party software tools to collect and analyse 6,100 Kenyan social media (Twitter) utterances from January 2012 to December 2017. This software reads and understands words’ meaning in multiple languages to allocate sentiment scores using a technology called Natural Language Processing (NLP). The proprietary NLP software, which incorporates the latest artificial intelligence advances, including deep learning, transforms unstructured textual data (i.e. a tweet or blog post) into structured data (i.e. a number) to gauge the authors’ changing emotional tone over time. Our model predicts both increases and decreases in average fatalities 50 to 150 days in advance, with overall accuracy approaching 85%. This finding suggests a role for influential actors in determining increases or decreases in violence and the method’s potential for advancing understandings of violence and language. Further, the findings demonstrate the utility of local political and sociological theoretical knowledge for calibrating algorithmic analysis. This approach may enable identification of specific speech configurations associated with an increased or decreased risk of violence. We propose further exploration of this methodology." (Abstract) more