Center for Security and Emerging Technology

Research suggests that partisanship and social media usage correlate with belief in COVID-19 misinformation and that misinformation shapes citizens' willingness to get vaccinated. However, this evidence comes overwhelmingly from frequent internet users in rich, Western countries. We run a panel survey early in the pandemic leveraging a prepandemic sample of urban middle-class Nigerians, many of whom do not use the internet. Analysis shows that opposition party support and social media usage are correlated with belief in antigovernment misinformation but not other types of COVID-19 misinformation. Surprisingly, we find no relationship between overall belief in misinformation and willingness to be vaccinated several weeks later. Partisanship and ethnicity are predictive of vaccine hesitancy, while men are both more likely to believe misinformation and more willing to be vaccinated. These findings have significant implications for understanding vaccine hesitancy in Nigeria and beyond.

Real-world harms caused by the use of AI technologies are widespread. Tracking and analyzing them improves our understanding of the variety of harms and the circumstances that lead to their occurrence once AI systems are deployed. This report presents a standardized conceptual framework for defining, tracking, classifying, and understanding harms caused by AI. It lays out the key elements required for the identification of AI harm, their basic relational structure, and definitions without imposing a single interpretation of AI harm. The brief concludes with an example of how to apply and customize the framework while keeping its modular structure.

A globally competitive AI workforce hinges on the education, development, and sustainment of the best and brightest AI talent. This issue brief provides an overview of the education systems in China and the United States, lending context to better understand the accompanying main report, “AI Education in China and the United States: A Comparative Assessment.”

Chinese and Russian government officials are keen to publicize their countries’ strategic partnership in emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence. This report evaluates the scope of cooperation between China and Russia as well as relative trends over time in two key metrics of AI development: research publications and investment. The findings expose gaps between aspirations and reality, bringing greater accuracy and nuance to current assessments of Sino-Russian tech cooperation.

China’s National Cybersecurity Center (NCC) resides on a 40 km2 plot in Wuhan. As one indication of its significance, the Chinese Communist Party’s highest-ranking members have an oversight committee for the facility. Over the next decade, the NCC will provide the talent, innovation, and indigenization of cyber capabilities that China’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Public Security, and People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force hacking teams lack. Though still under construction, the NCC’s first class of graduates will cross the stage in June 2022.

Growing popular and industry interest in high-performing natural language generation models has led to concerns that such models could be used to generate automated disinformation at scale. This report examines the capabilities of GPT-3--a cutting-edge AI system that writes text--to analyze its potential misuse for disinformation. A model like GPT-3 may be able to help disinformation actors substantially reduce the work necessary to write disinformation while expanding its reach and potentially also its effectiveness.

Today’s research and development investments will set the course for artificial intelligence in national security in the coming years. This Executive Summary presents key findings and recommendations from CSET’s two-part analysis of U.S. military investments in autonomy and AI, including our assessment of DOD’s research priorities, trends and gaps, as well as ways to ensure U.S. military leadership in AI in the short and the long term.

CSET research sheds light on the backgrounds and career paths of nearly 3,600 awardees in China’s Youth Thousand Talents Plan. While concerns over China’s recruitment of science and technology experts for military-supporting roles are legitimate, this brief finds that the vast majority of YTTP awardees receive civilian-oriented job offers.

Are great powers engaged in an artificial intelligence arms race? This issue brief explores the rhetorical framing of AI by analyzing more than 4,000 English-language articles over a seven-year period. Among its findings: a growing number of articles frame AI development as a competition, but articles using the competition frame represent a declining proportion of articles about AI.