Lecture on November 21, 2023
Generative AI’s Gappiness: Meaningfulness, Authorship, and the Credit-Blame Asymmetry
Prof. Dr. Sven Nyholm (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
About the lecture [poster]
When generative AI technologies generate novel texts, images, or music in response to prompts from users of these technologies, are the resulting outputs meaningful in all the ways that human-created texts, images, or music can be meaningful? Moreover, who exactly should be considered as the author of these AI outputs? Are texts created by generative AI perhaps best considered as authorless texts? In my presentation, I will relate the above-mentioned questions to the topic of who (if anyone) can take credit for, or potentially be blameworthy for, outputs created with the help of large language models and other generative AI technologies. I will argue that there is an important asymmetry with respect to how easily people can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for outputs they create with the help of generative AI technologies: in general, it is much harder to be praiseworthy for impressive outputs of generative AI than it is to be blameworthy for harmful outputs that we may produce with generative AI. This has implications for the issues of meaning and authorship. Generative AI technologies are in important ways “gappy”: they create gaps with respect to meaning and authorship, as well as with respect to responsibility for their outputs.
About the speaker
Sven Nyholm is Professor of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at LMU Munich. He is also a Principal Investigator in the Munich Centre for Machine Learning, a member of the Ethics Advisory Board of the Human Brain Project, and an Associate Editor of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics. His books include This is Technology Ethics: An Introduction, which was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2023. Nyholm’s research is about how modern technologies – such as artificial intelligence – force society to reconsider and update traditional ethical norms and values as well as our human self-conception.
photo credit: Angeline Swinkels
Tuesday, 21. November 2023, 18:15-19:45 (CET)
Address for joining us on-site:
Flügelbau West, 2. OG, Raum W221
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg