2023 Annual Public Lecture In Philosophy
10 March 2023
Join us on Thursday, March 23, from 3:30-5:00 pm in CCIS 1-140 for our Annual Public Lecture in Philosophy!
This year’s lecture “The Eliza Effect: Data Ethics for Machine Learning” will be delivered by Philosophy Professor Geoffrey Rockwell. Read Professor Rockwell’s lecture description below. All are welcome!
The latest generative AIs like ChatGPT that have exploded on the tech scene depend on massive training sets of billions of texts scraped from mostly off the internet. The billions of items gathered to train these machine learning models aren’t humanly vetted and it is unlikely there was consent or copyright clearance. Some predict that soon most of the content on the Internet will be AI generated leading to an absurd situation where AIs are generating their own training data. Either way, it is not surprising that these AIs are capable of toxic or inappropriate responses when (im)properly prompted and yet the business opportunities mean that they are now being rapidly prepared for public use. There are many ethical issues raised by these AIs; namely the ethics of how data is gathered and documented. I will critique how companies like OpenAI and Google discuss their ethics practices and imagine what should be the ethics of data for machine learning.