Keep Expressing Yourself and Stay Human, Urges AI Expert and Author Brian Christian

Christian began his day on campus meeting faculty members for a discussion about the issues raised in The Alignment Problem, the third book he has written on AI. "The story of my books is a story of interdisciplinary collision courses," said Christian, who majored in computer science at Brown University and went on to pursue creative writing and poetry alongside his technological scholarship.

Advances in AI are happening so rapidly, he stressed, that the technology is effectively running away with itself, which can have serious ethical implications. Consider, for example, how AI algorithms are judged to have displayed racial and gender biases in developing tools for areas like health care and the judicial system. This, say experts, is because the datasets used by large language models are themselves skewed and do not tell the whole story. In the case of health care, for example, studies have shown algorithms often train on data that underrepresent racial minorities, which, consequently, can give an inaccurate estimation of their health care needs.

Another risk highlighted by Christian was how AI tools that are meant to be predictive can end up being generative. He gave the example of a product designed to forecast house prices for the mortgage market. It became so successful that people ended up using it to generate prices-in the same way, he said, that predictive texts can end up changing how we write and express ourselves.

"AI at this point demands a radical interdisciplinarity," Christian told faculty members. In addition to computer science, those working in AI should consider a range of subjects, including philosophy (for ethical issues), political science (to understand regulatory and global supply chain challenges), environmental studies (to appreciate the impact the industry's huge data storage needs will have on the environment), and English (regarding the linguistic and textual implications of AI). The list goes on.