Ah, who doesn't love seeing the lake and powergrid draining lie generator slowly seep into every aspect of our lives, needed or not, enshittifying whatever remains after DRMs and Tethering?
But what if I told you this was happening all along, way before LLMs were a thing, with something we all use pretty much use daily but can't live without, effectively ensuring one returns home safe, and disaster management efforts be carried out effectively? Join this session for a dive into how Meta and RMSI’s AI-assisted road mapping initiative turned OpenStreetMap data in India a dumping ground for Big Tech's failed AI experiments, affecting the Global South to this day.
We’ll unpack how over-reliance on AI's hallucinations, skipped QA checks, and outright dismissal of local communities led to phantom roads, and why this isn’t just a tech fail, but a slap in the face to the collective efforts of grassroots mappers, and effectively rendering OSM unusable to an extent by polluting the project with junk data, as well as the fight back with more recent projects like Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team's fAIr are bringing the very tools to the community, aiding with mapping efforts in a responsible way.
A brief introduction to OpenStreetMap
Companies involved in improving OSM
Meta and OSM, and their initiatives
The event that changed it all. Where did it go wrong, and irrevocably change things for once and for all (or is it?)
The fight back, and a brief introduction to HOT's fAIr
The incident this talk covers is about is now 6-7 years old, and I don't think we have the space in our scheduling to cover such an old incident.
This a fairly niche, but is maybe interesting.
This a fairly niche, but is maybe interesting.
Will Meta ever be a sponsor for IndiaFOSS? If not, let's use the stage to get a few eyeballs. I think the story is worth telling. Atleast as a small-talk format.