If you’re a writer like me, the releases of ChatGPT by the artificial intelligence research company OpenAI and Google’s Bard AI might leave you shaking in your boots.
Both computer programs — known as chatbots — answer questions, translate languages, compose emails, and research and write essays and articles. They can accomplish these tasks in a manner virtually indistinguishable from human beings, but without human obstacles like procrastination and writer’s block.
AI technology is impacting almost every industry. Over the past month, corporations such as Google and Microsoft laid off thousands of workers and plan to replace some of them with AI.
If all of this sounds overwhelming, you’re in luck. You can learn all about AI at an upcoming seminar presented by Great Talk Inc., a local nonprofit, and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
The panel discussion “Is Artificial Intelligence Out of Control and is it Our Best Future?” will take place on Wednesday, Mar. 1, at 7 p.m. at JHU’s Bloomberg Center for Physics & Astronomy.
The program is free to the public. Panelists include Rama Chellappa, chief scientist of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy; Kathleen Featheringham, director of AI practice at Booz Allen Hamilton; Peter L. Levin, co-founder and CEO of Amida Technology Solutions; and Marc Rotenberg, president and founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy.
The discussion will be moderated by David Ignatius, an award-winning columnist and associate editor for the Washington Post.
Great Talk was founded in 2016 by Claudine and Diane Leigh Davison because the mother-and-daughter team felt there is a hunger for “conversation with a purpose” in the greater Baltimore area. Community leader Eve Vogelstein serves as the organization’s president.
“Great Talk is not a speaker series but an innovative series of conversations,” Diane Davison told Jmore in 2019. “The talks are structured to bring people together from across the region to participate in live and captivating discussions with noted panelists, and with each other.”
A Pikesville resident and former film and arts consultant for the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore, Claudine Davison said the board of Great Talk was unanimous in its support for a program on AI.
“The field of AI has exploded,” she said. “The topic is everywhere and has invaded every field that affects our lives. It’s in medicine, agriculture, all business, all technology and social media.”
Added her daughter, an entertainment lawyer and former Baltimorean who now lives in Florida: “There was a recent situation where a whole dinner party was built from AI. They built the faces; they built people’s likenesses that are just created artificially. It looks like there’s an actual video of a dinner party, and nothing is real. It’s all simulated. There’s some artificial intelligence that also used people’s images on the internet, used people’s proprietary information.”
All of these AI developments have occurred “at a speed that is exponential, astronomically crazy,” said Claudine Davison. “You can’t tell anymore what is real and what is not. And it’s extremely confusing and dangerous. Some people are complaining that it’s endangering education.”
But AI isn’t all bad, she said, because “it offers so much to improve human life in all sorts of ways. In surgery, they are investigating how to modify proteins that could change the biological makeup of the genes so it would change [the course of] a lot of diseases.
“Artificial intelligence can do a lot of things, a lot of repetitive tasks — assembly-line kind of stuff, the rote work, and depending on the industry, it can remove human error. It can remove, in some respects, danger to humans.”
For information, visit greattalk.org.
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