Agenda

Speaker: Prof.ssa Bettina Berendt, TU Berlin, Weizenbaum Institute and KU Leuven

Abstract:
ChatGPT and its brothers, sisters and wider family of generative AI have been taken up by people faster than maybe any technology in living memory. And this has happened at a time when the media, the popular imagination as well as legal regulation are (supposedly?) full of concerns about the ethics of the growing use of AI. Organisations, including universities, strive to come up with policies, ethics guidelines, and practical licensing arrangements for GenAI use to keep track and also to protect against their members liberally divulging, on their personal, often ‘free’, accounts with OpenAI and others, personal data about themselves and others as well as confidential organisational knowledge. But are guidelines effective incentives for users to develop better ways of using? In this talk, I concentrate on researchers as users and try to go beyond ethics guidelines rule sets by asking what our core and overarching tasks and responsibilities as researchers are. In the light of answers to these questions, I dissect three key challenges posed by GenAI: bias, (deficiencies of) provenance, and shallowness. I discuss examples of usage practices gathered from colleagues and students in the light of these challenges, and aim to enrich the list of good practices by drawing on your experiences. 

Bio Sketch:
Bettina Berendt holds the Chair for Internet and Society at Technical University of Berlin, Germany. She is also a director of the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin and a guest professor at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research includes Data Science und Critical Data Science, especially with respect to Privacy/Data Protection, discrimination and fairness, as well as AI and ethics, with a focus on textual and web-related data. Further details can be found at https://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~bettina.berendt .

Bettina holds a PhD in Computer Science/Cognitive Science from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and a Habilitation in Information Systems from Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. She was assistant professor in Information Systems at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, from 2003-2007 and associate professor in Artificial Intelligence at KU Leuven, Belgium from 2007-2019.