So, this solves a problem whereas our adversaries are paid professionals working nine to six on information manipulation, but the community fact-checkers were not, and so they only got to clarify it when they have time. But now, with language models automatically provide a clarifying context, the community can focus ...

And so, because we expect the AI-generated deepfake manipulations to be done in such a short time frame, it is important that our countermeasures are equally quick. So, for example, the Taiwanese Cofacts, for collaborative fact checking, Cofacts project, by the civil society, not the government, the g0v or GovZero ...

The STIX format was originally used for cybersecurity threat indicator sharing, like when our computer gets hacked in, we’re using some zero-day vulnerability, even though it’s stopped by some other measures, we will use STIX to notify our democratic allies, so that when the attacker goes to their machine, that’s ...

Yeah, for this kind of foreign information manipulation and interference, or FIMI, there are already existing STIX, or structured threat information expression.

And now, learning from the Social Dilemma, we need to work with AI this time, setting up such reporting, forecasting, democratic alignment and guardrails before our economy becomes overly dependent on it. Because in the social media case, many other jurisdictions say, but our agency’s webpage is now our Facebook ...

But of course, you would ask, why don’t the social media companies work on civic integrity and counter-polarization and so on? Well, I think that partly is because such harms are not easily observable when it’s just a few university alum networks connecting to each other. Some of the harms ...

So that when people go through fact-checking by themselves, and also with the community, they might become inoculated against the polarization, the hate, and so on. So, this illustration of us being the democratized response, and the PRC being a more top-down authoritarian response, points to two very different ways ...

But at the same time, Taiwan decided to democratize the ways for each and every student to contribute to fact-checking, for example, as part of their junior high school education, maybe they fact-check the air pollution measurement by measuring air quality themselves, or fact-check the three presidential candidates as they’re ...

We talk about 2014, in Sunflower Movement. Around the same time, the PRC regime in Beijing decided that they don’t want retweet or share or anything to spread a kind of chaotic messages. So, they decided to impose a top-down way to censor, or at least strongly moderate, their social ...

And then we can retrain AI models, or to work with the AI service providers to tailor-made the kind of AI that fits the local people’s needs, instead of asking local people to adapt to whatever mainstream AI is doing. And this is important because many of those harms cannot ...

And then the second pillar is that if the local community, any community, feel that the current path of AI somehow causes harm, causes what we call epistemic injustice, like writing off the knowledge and wisdom that they have. Maybe they’re indigenous nations, maybe they have ways that are different ...

Yes, the Taiwan model is two pillars. We call it democratic alignment. One pillar is to ensure everyone in Taiwan can have the kind of access to not just use AI, but also tune AI to their liking. So, this is the first one, democratizing access.

So, I would say I spend around half of my time, but in three different roles, all working with the emerging challenges presented by generative AI.

Previously, to be a hacker, to hack into a system, you have to learn programming language. But now with generative AI, you just need to learn English and then you can also hack into a generative AI system, right? So, it opens new cybersecurity threats and the cybersecurity arm also ...

I say this because AI touches upon all three parts. Like AI can actually, through deepfakes and so on, interfere with democratic process, so the participation arm needs to counter against this kind of synthesized political speech. But the progress arm needs to work with the least empowered people and ...

So, participation, progress, and safety, this triangle forms our ministerial mandate. This is quite unusual. In most other jurisdictions, the digital ministry either doesn’t exist, these are three different ministries, or they exist but it’s just two of the three, whereas the other one, like safety or the progress, belongs ...

And nowadays, I’m the Minister of Digital Affairs. The ministry is in charge of digital participation, universal broadband access, and public infrastructures that enable digital identity and many other services. That’s our ministry. And under our ministry, there are two administrations, one for industrial digital transformation and another administration for ...

I also worked at the time with the Oxford University Press to bring the dictionary making work, lexicography, to the lower-resource languages, languages that do not have an official body to make language dictionaries and therefore not part of the cloud service localization, so that the people on the ground ...

Before joining the cabinet in 2016, for six years, I worked with the Siri team in Apple on natural language technologies, and specifically with a team called “cloud service localization,” meaning that we work with people who speak different languages so that Siri can custom itself to fit the local ...

And afterwards during 2014-15, as an advisor to the cabinet, I helped launch the first e-rulemaking platform in Taiwan, the vTaiwan project, which successfully resolved issues around Uber, sharing economy startups, and many other topics, before becoming a full-time minister in 2016.

After three weeks of peaceful occupy, the demands were met and the competent authorities in Taiwan agreed from that point onward, open government, open data, civic participation is going to be a national direction because we have shown that collective intelligence actually can produce coherent demands.

It’s fine. So, it’s called the Sunflower Movement and with half a million people on the street and many more online, we helped the facilitators, the NGOs and so on to be not just thoroughly non-violent around the parliament, but also make a coherent demand out of the people on ...

Sure thing.

Sure. So, I first entered the cabinet as a reverse mentor, as a young advisor to the then Minister without Portfolio, Jaclyn Tsai, around the end of 2014. And that happened because in March 2014, the g0v movement, which I’m a participant, contributed to a massive deliberation around, for example, ...

I can send you my sound file, if it happens to not work on your end.

Okay.

Excellent.

Pretty good. So, before we begin — we will make a transcript of this interview, including your words, but we will embargo it until you publish and you get to co-edit, if that’s okay with you.

Thank you. Live long and prosper.

So, a lot of our experiments in presidential hackathon and so on is about increasing the bandwidth of democracy and reducing the latency of democracy in a way that augments and complements, but do not replace referendums in the national level and the parliament itself. It basically informs them better, ...

And if we forbid people younger than 18 and residents, including expats, to participate. Then we lose the important voices that are not going to be reflected equally well in the traditional representative democracy, simply because they cannot vote for local city councilors.

And the residency, as I mentioned, can be earned through open-source contributions. And it also extends to people younger than 18. We believe that, like, those almost citizens, people younger than 18, are the most important. Because they have the most incentive and motivation and, frankly speaking, time. In the ...

Yeah, the official, like, e-collecting for referendums and so on, of course, requires that you are an 18-year-old citizen with all what that entails. On the other hand, the platform I mentioned, Presidential Hackathon, the join platform, e-petition collecting for referendums, participatory budget, and so on, that is relaxed, such ...

So, long story short, I think there’s two main pillars. One is to build credible neutrality in a multi-stakeholder governance model, and also work directly with senior career public service so that they become the most important stakeholders because they are around, regardless of the ruling party.

And building upon that credible neutrality, the civil society then learns that, actually, you don’t need the government, especially the national government, to run this process. The civil society can run this process as long as they have partners that are equally credibly neutral. The g0v bimonthly hackathons has been ...

It is essential for any democratic deliberation to gain legitimacy through resolving smaller conflicts at first. For example, we first, in 2015, helped resolve the Uber-Ride-Sharing regulation issue, working with the Ministry of Transportation, and Labor, of course, Finance, Economic Affairs, you name it. And if we started saying, let’s ...

We are in a position where we are known for credible neutrality. I’m known for not belonging to any political party, being non-binary not just in gender, but also in political affiliations.— in everything, really, and taking all the sides.

This is great. Even philosophical question. I think in Taiwan, we’re quite fortunate that ever since 2014, where we first started with this cross-source democracy stuff, that we’ve been able to work with career public service directly, instead of associating with any political parties.

So, all these were the champions within their respective ministry departments. And we work so closely together, literally having weekly iterations where we just get people’s input and roll out new versions every Thursday, every Thursday, eventually became the new ministry. So, I would say that these were the champions, ...

Yeah. The Ministry of Digital Affairs, which as I mentioned, didn’t exist until last August, is itself a combination of the most successful ministries when engaging with open culture. As I mentioned during the pandemic, the electronic services and e-government task force in the national development council responsible for open ...

So, there is no prize money, zero prize money. It doesn’t go to the team. It goes to the idea. This sector of collaboration, electronic signature, telecare, many, many of those infrastructure level ideas that prove on the municipality eventually found its way into national infrastructure because of Presidential Hackathon. ...

And five teams every year domestically, the president gives her trophy. The trophy used to be a micro projector that if you turn it on, it shows the president giving you the trophy. So, very meta. And carrying with it the presidential commitment that whatever you did in the district ...

Indeed, our data.gov.tw, our open data portal, is going to be public code, pretty soon, next year. But its current version is already in form by the g0v re-imagination of the open data platform and many other websites as well. And the reason why is that we have a systemic ...

Yes, g0v. G-zero-V. So, this is a very interesting domain name. The idea is that for each of the government services that the people don’t like, people can fork the government. So, something that g0v.tw, you can change your o to a 0 and you get to the people’s version ...

And this is exactly how we are doing our trustworthy and dialogue engine in the science ministry. We’re working with not just Mandarin, but also Taiyi and so on, so that people in different languages in Taiwan have a real say in how to model their language instead of forcing ...

But the point I’m making is that this is privacy conserving. It never leaks my laptop and if we extend that slightly with the technology like Talk to the City and Polis and so on, it means that the indigenous nations and the national language communities do not need to ...

And so, we are happy to learn that nowadays distillation of those pre-trained models, fine tuning a quantized version of it, recently Stable Diffusion Turbo, all showed us that it is now quite possible to tune even the most cutting-edge models in a way that fits even a laptop. Indeed, ...

And as I mentioned, in Taiwan, we have more than 20 national languages, 16 indigenous nations with 42 language variations. So, we have a total of over 20 languages. Many of these languages, if you try to ask a frontier language model about it, it outputs complete nonsense.

So, before joining the cabinet, I worked on the basic education curriculum and also with the Oxford University Press to empower the majority world to co-create Siri-compatible inputs. And indeed, that was because for many of these languages, there is simply no comparable economic incentive for the largest AI labs ...

This is a great question.