The ethics of AI: from friendly chatbot to automated systems. Talk by Dr Michelle Fabienne Bieger – digiLab and University of Exeter.
“AI” has captivated the imaginations of the general public for years—most of us are familiar with characters like The Terminator or read the sci-fi stories from Ray Bradbury in school. In today’s academic landscape, it touches fields ranging from mathematics to life sciences to robotics and is no longer the sole domain of computer sciences. We might now all be using a version of “AI” in today’s world—summarising meeting minutes with ChatGPT or generating an image for our company slideshow with Midjourney.
To reject “AI” is to name yourself a “Luddite” and to reject progress. Yet what are these algorithms, and how can we be sure what they are doing under the hood to produce text, or generate an image, or automate systems? This talk will explore the extraordinary claims made by the corporations behind these products, and investigate what we can do, if anything, to push back against the algorithms that have come to dominate everything from world geopolitics to your auto-filled LinkedIn posts.
Dr Bieger is a software engineer and researcher. Her work at digiLab is focused on productising machine learning applications. Her expertise in machine learning and AI ethics stems from her PhD background, where she used machine learning and parameter estimation tools to investigate the properties of atmospheres of planets outside of our solar system (exoplanets). Her interest in AI ethics in particular stemmed from her time teaching at the university, where students and staff were engaging with generative AI—yet hadn’t been given much guidance around how best to utilise it or knowledge on how these algorithms were shaped.