In 2023 New York Times journalist Kevin Roose reported that a chatbot had declared love for him and urged him to divorce his wife.  Since then stories abound of vulnerable people harming themselves after lengthy exchanges with GenAI chatbots.  In a recent instance, a vulnerable teen discussed suicide with a chatbot and asked for feedback about the noose he had fashioned.  In yet another instance a clearly delusional person was encouraged to murder his mother and then commit suicide.

Medical professionals are concerned that use of chatbots in diagnosis and treatment recommendations without real-time supervision by experienced professionals may lead to harm.  GenAI tools have not been designed to fulfill the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.  Physicians are asking whether these GenAI tools can be and will be used responsibly.  Currently the FDA categorizes chatbot systems as self-help or wellness tools, placing them outside of existing regulatory regimes.

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we discuss the implications of GenAI tools with Dr Jane Rosenthal, a seasoned clinician with extensive experience examining medical ethics in the context of a major medical center.

Once upon a time we thought we had privacy. Then came credit cards, which captured the card owner's location and activity with each transaction. Then came the Internet, which made connecting all the dots easy and cheap, and the erosion of privacy accelerated.

Large language models, LLMs, like the Generative AI system ChatGPT and its ilk have the potential to make the cost of connecting dots vanishingly small, thus eliminating even the illusion of privacy, especially because large databases are irresistible to LLM developers as training data for their models.

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we are fortunate to have as our guest Jane Horvath. Jane is comparatively unique in having earned academic degrees and practiced in both Computer Science and in Law. Before law school, she wrote software that may still be running on the International Space Station.

Jane is further distinguished by having served as Apple's Chief Privacy Officer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel, and the DoJ's first Privacy Counsel and Civil Liberties Officer, among other roles.

The public has been fascinated by the experience of interacting with large language models, or LLMs, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.  Inaccuracies, called hallucinations, continue to appear in LLM output.  Some lawyers, among others, continue to use these outputs without verifying their accuracy.  Doing so damages their work product and reputations.

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we will be looking at current work with LLMs that plays to their strengths and involves a lower risk of inaccurate outputs.  In particular we will look at the use of LLMs to translate between languages.

In this episode we talk with Archie McKenzie, the founder of a Silicon Valley startup that is offering internationalization services to software teams.

Welcome to the second of two episodes with MIT Professor David Mindell.  In these conversations we are exploring the detailed realities of "human in the loop" systems.  In the first session we learned about the Apollo Program's lunar landing control system.  In this episode we are going to explore an important contemporary human plus computer control system failures involving a ship of the US Navy.


The first accident was a collision in the Singapore Strait in the pre-dawn darkness of August 21, 2017.  The National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, determined that the causes of the collision between the destroyer John S McCain and the tanker Alnic MC included a lack of effective operational oversight, insufficient training, and inadequate bridge operating procedures.  Also contributing to the accident were the John S McCain bridge team’s loss of situational awareness and failure to follow loss of steering emergency procedures.  This loss of awareness goes by the name Mode Confusion.

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters, #22, and the following one, #23 we are going to do something unusual.  We will explore the adoption of sophisticated control automation and look for lessons that may apply to the adoption of AI-augmented systems.

To help us understand these lessons, we are fortunate to have for our next two episodes Professor David Mindell of MIT.  He is the acclaimed author of numerous books in this area, notably "Digital Apollo - Human and Machine in Spaceflight."  In this book he examines both the design of the flight controls for the vehicles that conveyed astronauts to the moon in 1969 and beyond and how the people were trained to use them.

Dr. David Mindell is Professor of Aerospace Engineering and the History of Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Professor Mindell has spent more than three decades researching the myriad relationships between people and machines and innovating to improve them.  He is interested in human and machine collaboration; navigation and autonomy for transportation and mobility; ultra-wideband systems; history of aviation and spaceflight; and entrepreneurship.

The entertainment industry in the US, with revenues in 2022 of about 8.5 billion dollars, is only three hundredths of one percent of the 23.3 trillion dollar US economy.  However, entertainment is far more important to society as a whole than the industry’s financials might suggest.

In 2022 when large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini began to show signs of prodigious capabilities in the entertainment domain, studios began to experiment with using AI in lieu of actors and writers.  In response to the refusal by the studios to negotiate guardrails for the use of AI, the unions representing the writers and actors went out on strike and forced negotiations.

The agreements concerning the status of generative AI that were instrumental in settling the strikes are a tremendously important step in establishing governance of AI in operational practice, at least for one industry.  These agreements may hold important lessons for other industries.

We are fortunate to have as our guest for this episode of Exploring AI Matters Louise Nemschoff, who practices entertainment and copyright law in Los Angeles.  She represents a wide variety of parties in both domestic and international transactions.

AI is increasingly viewed as a potential co-creator of text, images, videos, music, and audio.  However, in March of 2023 the US Copyright Office expressed the view that ‘copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity.’

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters Claudia Ray, a partner in the New York office of Kirkland & Ellis, a major law firm with a distinguished IP practice, discusses the important questions of intellectual property raised by the newly emerging artificial intelligence technologies, particularly large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

This episode of the ABA-funded podcast Exploring AI Matters was recorded at a Continuing Legal Education session.  Our subject is, "The Intersection of Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence."

Our two guests, Candace Jones and Jon Garon, are distinguished lawyers who have written extensively on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.  Some of their writing are included in the materials for this program and will be linked in the podcast web page about this episode.

From ancient times what we now call mathematical models have been used to predict the arrival of seasons, comet returns, and eclipses.  With sophisticated mathematics, good data gathering, and modern computers we can now predict things like the tides and the trajectories of interplanetary probes with considerable accuracy.  We have also made progress in predicting weather.

For some phenomena, for example earthquakes, we are still seeking to develop predictive models.

As we heard in Episode 2 of this podcast, AI systems can be described as making predictions based on models, models that are trained on vast collections of data.  These models seem intuitively different from the others.  However, some truths hold for both kinds of models, in particular while "all models are wrong, some models are useful," as is explained by our guest in this episode in which we eplore the world of models with Dr Erica Thompson.

In this episode of Exploring AI Matters we have two guests from the most senior ranks of the Royal Air force, Air Marshals Philip Osborn and Edward Stringer.  Both men joined the UK’s Royal Air Force in 1982.  Air Marshal Stringer served 36 years until 2018; and Air Marshal Obsorn served 37 years until 2019.

Intelligence has always been about dredging through vast pools of dull bureaucratic documents, seeking illuminating insights.  In this episode we will explore military thinking about how to responsibly use AI.  One of our guests has said, “data is the new oil,” and expresses concern about the tainting of our data by our adversaries.  We discuss with our guests the Royal Air Force’s use of AI in intelligence and operations. [2024-04-19]