Training artificial intelligence models does not typically involve coming face-to-face with an armed soldier who is pointing a gun at you and shouting at your driver to get out of the car. But the system that F. LeRon Shults and Justin Lane, cofounders of CulturePulse, are developing for the United Nations is not a typical AI model. “I got pulled over by the military, by a guy holding because we had a Palestinian taxi driver who drove past a line he wasn't supposed to,” Shults tells WIRED.
Their idea for an AI program that models the belief systems that drive human behavior first began when Lane moved to Northern Ireland a decade ago to study whether computation modeling and cognition could be used to understand issues around religious violence.