Algorithms are increasingly dictating our lives, deciding what we watch, what we buy, where we eat, and what we read. Rather than serving as neutral tools, modern algorithms act as intermediaries, purposefully designed and biased in how they curate our relationships, mine our attention, and influence our psychological development.
Aligned AI is building a new hardware and software ecosystem called Canvas. It’s designed to put humans back in the driver’s seat. By prioritizing human agency over algorithmic engagement, Aligned AI is creating tools that empower people to think for themselves.
Aligned AI has a simple yet profound vision: providing the technological tools humans need to lead more empowered and agency-driven lives. A crucial tool in that toolbelt for critical thinking and development is Wikipedia, the largest endeavor of Open Knowledge in human history. Aligned AI includes an offline version of Wikipedia in Canvas, using the Wikimedia Enterprise Snapshot API to extract the most updated version of Wikipedia as often as needed.
Wikimedia Enterprise Snapshots as Offline Ground Truth
Rebecca Gorman, co-founder of Aligned AI, highlights:
“Parents are increasingly concerned about the long-term effects of hyper-engagement, including ‘cognitive atrophy’: the loss of critical thinking skills due to an over-reliance on AI to provide instant answers. We needed to create a system that allows access to the ‘good stuff’: human-curated knowledge, free sources for learning, and open data; but without the ‘bad stuff’: algorithmic bias, artificial engagement, or parasocial relationships with chatbots.”
To solve these issues, Aligned AI has built an offline tech ecosystem for families. This ecosystem includes:
- Search tools that don’t guess the intent of the user and bypass critical thinking, but instead provide the resources a user needs to read, analyze, and find the answer themselves
- Non-chatbot AI that supports humans in ways that are free of cognitive deskilling, personification of AI, and other harms.
- Coding tools to help children learn how technology works, and allow anyone to create their own software and computing environment, simply and intuitively, free from ‘vibe coding’.
Aligned’s vision of providing all of this in an offline product presents a unique technical challenge: how do you provide a world-class library of information without a live connection to the World Wide Web?
Aligned AI utilizes our Snapshot API to download and host comprehensive datasets from Wikimedia projects directly on their devices. This allows people to use Aligned’s offline search tool while still finding relevant Wikipedia articles to read and learn from. Other important data sources included in Aligned’s offline search are datasets from Project Gutenberg, credible news providers, and academic journals.
By periodically pulling the newest Wikipedia snapshots, Aligned AI can securely update these offline resources. This gives users access to the latest scientific consensus and historical data without exposing them to the risks of the open web.
Making it Easy to Protect and Empower Families
Jocelyn Kelley, a social anthropologist at Aligned AI, unveils their extensive market research:
“When talking to mainly mothers, on the one hand, we see hypervigilant parents who have time to implement parental controls and have deliberate screen time limits and content limits on their kids’ devices. Those parents say: ‘The parental controls we get are good enough, but are incredibly burdensome to navigate.’ On the other hand, many parents are simply too busy to have the bandwidth to engage with these intentionally obtuse parental controls. Both of these groups are worried about their children’s safety, and they often feel hopeless.”
Aligned AI set out to build a system where parents don’t need the bandwidth to ensure their children’s safety when engaging with technology: it’s already built into the ecosystem. Not having to worry about device usage time or their child developing a parasocial relationship with a chatbot, is such an important need for families that already have too much on their minds.
Aligned’s safe AI product isn’t only for children, it also has components for adults. Aligned wanted to create tools that provide everyone, adults too, with time offline to develop satisfying and meaningful relationships. This means Aligned’s tools provide you with the information you need while also introducing the right amount of friction so that you can decouple and focus on what’s important.
Aligned AI’s approach resonates deeply with the core values of the Wikimedia movement. Both are dedicated to the idea that access to information should be empowering, not manipulative. By utilizing Wikimedia Enterprise project data, Aligned AI is able to deliver a product where the technology serves the user’s intent, fostering a generation of critical thinkers who are capable of navigating the world with autonomy.
You too can access Wikimedia Enterprise APIs to download the same data that powers Aligned AI’s offline ecosystem.
About Aligned AI
Aligned AI is a technology company dedicated to making artificial intelligence more precise, reliable, and controllable for the consumer market. Founded by Rebecca Gorman and Dr. Stuart Armstrong, the Aligned AI research lab aims to put humanity in the driver’s seat.
Photo Credits
AWE computers in the kids area, by Texas State Library and Archives Commission, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons