The Jefferson Center will present a discussion of ChatGPT and similar Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that use language in amazingly human ways led by Jefferson Center member Dr. Tony Davis.
Sunday, February 19, 2023, 4-6 pm. Co-Hosted by Science Works at 1500 East Main St. in Ashland.
Dr. Davis will facilitate a conversation about the effects and implications of these AI systems, focusing on education and critical thinking. The session will begin by showing some of ChatGPT’s capabilities in action. Then discussion will turn to broader issues. Is this the end of student essays? To what extent can their use be detected and regulated? What kinds of skills become less relevant when students use this technology in their written work? Are fears about losing crucial cognitive abilities justified?
AI systems offer wide-ranging, plausible, coherent, and nearly instant responses to all kinds of queries and instructions. Ask ChatGPT for suggestions about attracting customers to a new café, and it provides a list of very sensible ones. Ask it to write a sonnet in French about dogs hunting squirrels and it pops one out. But such systems also prompt some deep and potentially disturbing questions. How much can we trust what they say? Which applications are fair, transparent, and ethical? How do our ideas about trust, authorship, authoritative sources, and deception adjust to this way of producing written – and, for that matter, spoken – material? And in the end, how much do we care?
As we rapidly enter an age of machines with uncanny abilities – superhuman game-playing skills, deep-fake videos, autonomous vehicles, and drug design – systems that use human language fluently challenge us at a visceral and fundamental level. How do the prospects of writing by machine compare with other circumstances when we’ve had to deal with automation and technological change, such as smartphones, calculators, the printing press, or the invention of writing itself?
Dr. Tony Davis received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford and his career since then has focused primarily on computational linguistics and knowledge representation including audio/video search and retrieval and computer-assisted medical coding. He taught courses on computational linguistics and information retrieval at Georgetown University for 15 years.
The Jefferson Center is a Rogue Valley non-profit focused on critical thinking using secular humanist values to understand and engage with issues important to our community. See https:thejeffcenter.org for more details on this and future events.
