AI Transparency Statement

1.Purpose of this statement

Because machine learning is built into several parts of the platform, we describe here — in one place and in plain terms — where it operates, whose systems perform it, what its limits are, and how people stay in control. We update this statement when the platform’s use of AI changes materially.

2.Where AI is used

• Optional chat and voice assistant. The Library offers an AI assistant to find relevant hosted or saved items. Chat provides linked source results and a short explanation, with controls to open or save items. Voice can find content, open pages, and save or remove bookmarks on request. It can continue speaking while these actions run. It reports tool results, and you can interrupt, mute the microphone, or end the call. Microphone audio and the content needed for your request are processed by OpenAI. World Wide does not save audio or conversation history; searches, bookmark changes, and usage records follow their normal storage rules.
• Submission assistance. When you paste an announcement or upload an abstract, a language model extracts the structured fields (title, dates, speakers, location) to pre-fill the form. You review and can correct everything before submitting.
• Summaries and descriptions. Some descriptive texts on the platform — content summaries, topic overviews, extracted keywords — are produced with AI assistance from the underlying scholarly material.
• Classification. Content is assigned to scientific domains and topics by a model so that browsing and filtering work across disciplines.
• Semantic search and recommendations. Text — content, search queries, and (if you maintain one) your profile — is converted into numerical representations (embeddings) used to match related work, rank search results, and populate recommendation surfaces.
• Moderation assistance. Models screen submissions for policy violations. Automated rules can approve or reject content; people can review contested outcomes.
• Decorative imagery. Abstract banner and thumbnail images for scientific domains are AI-generated artwork; they depict no real people or events.

3.What AI is not used for

• AI screening is used for content publication, not to determine eligibility for employment, credit, insurance, or public benefits. A publication decision can be contested through our reporting and human-review process.
• No emotion recognition, biometric categorisation, or identification of natural persons.
• No advertising profiles, and no sale of data to AI vendors.
• Uploaded audio and video are not automatically transcribed. The optional voice assistant processes live microphone audio when you start a conversation.

4.Provider and data handling

Language-model, voice, embedding, and image generation run through the API platform of OpenAI (contracting entity for the EEA: OpenAI Ireland Ltd), acting as our processor. Under OpenAI’s API terms, content submitted through the API is not used to train OpenAI’s models unless the customer opts in. Under standard API controls, abuse-monitoring logs may be retained for up to 30 days. Every applicable World Wide Responses API request sets store: false, which disables Responses application-state storage but does not remove standard abuse-monitoring logs. World Wide has no Zero Data Retention or Modified Abuse Monitoring arrangement with OpenAI. OpenAI’s current data processing addendum is incorporated into the API terms and uses an adequacy decision or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, as applicable, for onward transfers.

We send only the text a task needs: the content being processed, the search query being matched, or the profile text being indexed. We do not send credentials, analytics event records, or data unrelated to the task. A document or profile can itself contain an email address or other personal data, so review material before invoking a feature.

5.Machine-generated content and its limits

Language models produce plausible text, not verified fact. Machine contributions on World Wide can therefore be incomplete, outdated, or wrong — a summary can flatten a nuance, an extracted date can be misread, a classification can miss the field. Treat machine-assisted material as a pointer to the original source, and verify details that matter — deadlines, eligibility rules, scientific claims — against that source. Nothing machine-generated on this platform constitutes professional, legal, medical, or career advice.

Public topic descriptions, machine-produced seminar summaries, and AI-generated domain artwork carry a visible “AI-generated” label that is also exposed to assistive technology. Form extraction is labelled in the review flow rather than on the final listing because a person reviews and edits those fields before publication. Classification, embeddings, search ranking, and moderation signals are not themselves published content. If you find machine-generated material that is wrong, misleading, or not identifiable as such, report it (Section 7) and we will correct or label it.

6.Human oversight

Submitters review pre-filled fields before posting. Automated moderation does not mean that every outcome has already been reviewed by a person: you can contest an outcome and request human review. Editorial corrections can replace machine output. AI-dependent extraction, classification, or enrichment may be delayed or unavailable when a provider fails; the existing public material and account controls remain separate from those processing steps.

7.Questions and reports

Questions about AI on World Wide, reports of incorrect or unlabelled machine-generated content, and objections to AI-assisted processing of your data (see the Privacy Notice, Section 10) all reach us at info@world-wide.org.