đź“ş Livestream: Generative AI: Hype, Harms, and the Responsible Tech Community w/ Dr. Rumman Chowdhury and Elizabeth M. Renieris
ChatGPT. Midjourney. Harmful deepfakes.
Generative Artificial Intelligence has become a mainstream sensation — but how can the Responsible Tech community be prepared to determine hype from harm?
To answer this question, All Tech is Human is curating a monthly livestream series to highlight a range of interdisciplinary experts working on artificial intelligence. From policy experts and software engineers to lawyers and ethicists and beyond, we’re bringing together our mulitstakeholder community to increase AI literacies, promote discussion, and help co-create a brighter future between humans ant technology.
On Friday, April 7, All Tech is Human Program Director Rebekah Tweed moderated a conversation between Dr. Rumman Chowdhury and Elizabeth M. Renieris to kick-off our series!
In our first livestream on the hype and harms of Generative AI, we centered the conversation on the impacts of the sudden accessibility of generative AI, the corporate AI arms race it has inspired, and the lax regulatory environment that this is all happening in.
This accessibility has fueled an unprecedented level of popular interest in AI, especially after ChatGPT was released and integrated into Microsoft’s search engine Bing.
In the interest of context-setting, we provide a quick rundown of the recent timeline:
ChatGPT was released to the public in November and integrated into Microsoft’s search engine Bing on Feb. 10th. On Feb. 26th, NYT published an op-ed by Ezra Klein called “The Imminent Danger of AI is one No One is Talking about” before John Oliver did a segment on ChatGPT the next day on Feb. 27, touching on important issues like algorithmic bias, explainability, robustness, privacy, power dynamics, copyright issues, lack of regulations, and more.
On March 8th, NYT published Noam Chomsky’s op-ed, “The False Promise of ChatGPT” which rebutted LLMs as a path to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and highlighted LLMs’ limitations. Thomas Friedman wrote “Our New Promethean Moment” for NYT on Mar. 21st; and on March 24th, NYT published Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin’s op-ed on “Threats to Humanity Posed by AI”.
The media hype cycle was truly ignited on March 28th when Future of Life Institute released an open letter calling for a 6 month pause on training AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT4. This open letter prompted alarming news pieces from NYT, WSJ, CNN, and CBS News (often featuring press photos of Elon Musk).
On March 29th, Time went a step further and published “The Only Way to Deal With the Threat From AI? Shut It Down” by Eliezer Yudkowsky; and on March 31st, Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell wrote an open letter called “Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter”.
So, in light of all of this breathless media coverage, we dive right in – what’s the problem with the hype? What new problems or areas of harm are emerging? What are the privacy pitfalls of GenAI? And how could global governance work?
Speaker Bios:
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She is a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics, creating cutting-edge socio-technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI. She is an active contributor to discourse around responsible technology with bylines in the Atlantic, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, MIT Technology Review and VentureBeat.
Dr. Chowdhury currently runs Parity Consulting, Parity Responsible Innovation Fund, and is a Responsible AI Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Minderoo Center for Democracy and Technology at Cambridge University and a visiting researcher at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Previously, Dr. Chowdhury was the Director of META (ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) team at Twitter, leading a team of applied researchers and engineers to identify and mitigate algorithmic harms on the platform. Prior to Twitter, she was CEO and founder of Parity, an enterprise algorithmic audit platform company. She formerly served as Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence. In her work as Accenture’s Responsible AI lead, she led the design of the Fairness Tool, a first-in-industry algorithmic tool to identify and mitigate bias in AI systems. Dr. Chowdhury co-authored a Harvard Business Review piece on it’s influences and impact.
Elizabeth M. Renieris is an internationally renowned privacy expert (CIPP/E, CIPP/US), lawyer, researcher, and author focused on the ethical and human rights implications of new and advanced technologies, with a specific emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain, and digital identity. She is a frequent writer and speaker on these topics with bylines in Wired, Slate, NPR, Forbes, and The New York Times, among other outlets.
A senior research associate at Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI and affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Elizabeth has also held fellowships with Stanford's Digital Civil Society Lab and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She serves as the Guest Editor to MIT Sloan Management Review’s Responsible AI project and was named one of the "Brilliant Women in AI Ethics" in 2022 by Women in AI Ethics.
As the founder and CEO of HACKYLAWYER, an innovative consultancy focused on law and policy engineering, Elizabeth has advised the World Bank, U.K. Parliament, European Commission, U.S. Congress, and a variety of startups, global corporations, and international and nongovernmental organizations alike on law and policy questions related to AI/ML, blockchain, and digital identity, as well as other new and advanced technologies.
Elizabeth is the author of Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press, 2023). She holds an LLM from the London School of Economics, JD from Vanderbilt University, and AB from Harvard College.
Moderated by:
Rebekah Tweed is a leader in Responsible Tech and Public Interest Technology careers, talent, and hiring trends. She is the creator of the Responsible Tech Job Board, the Program Director at All Tech is Human, and the Assistant Producer of A BETTER TECH, 2021 Public Interest Technology (PIT) Convention & Career Fair, hosted by New York University and funded by New America's PIT-University Network, where she manages the career fair and senior talent network and curates the job board and career profile gallery. Rebekah is also the Co-Chair of the IEEE Global AI Ethics Initiative Editing Committee and a member of the Arts Committee. Previously, Rebekah worked as the Project Manager for NYC law firm Eisenberg & Baum, LLP's AI Fairness and Data Privacy Practice Group, where she examined technology's impact on society, organizing and promoting virtual events to build public awareness around algorithmic discrimination and data privacy issues in New York City and beyond.