The AI & Society Symposium: Where Technology Meets Human Values

This symposium inquires into the conceptions of the human built into generative AI. 

GenAI systems sound like us: they say “I understand,” they apologize, they appear to care. They’re also made for a user, and so they come with assumptions about who that user is: what they need and what they can already do. And they’re built on assumptions about what intelligence itself is. Some of these pictures of the human reflect choices made by engineers and product teams; others were assumed without anyone ever deciding. It all demands to be examined. This symposium brings these and related questions into public discussion, asking what it means to be human at a time when these systems are made like us and for us, even as this ‘us’ is still being decided. 

You can send questions to [email protected].

Organized by Pol Pardini Gispert, Anika Mukherjee, Daniel Munro, and Seth Villegas, with support from the Boston University Center for the Humanities and the APA Berry Fund.