Summit on LLMs rallies leading AI experts
Ask a large language model (LLM) – a generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology like ChatGPT – what a Muslim man looks like, and it may churn out photos of terrorists. Punch in a request for photos of New Delhi, India’s capital city with rich cultural diversity, and you might get slides of fiery slums. “People with disabilities” might yield images of people with glitchy, dysmorphic faces in wheelchairs – a tell-tale sign that AI is producing images without enough data to draw from. To leading AI scholars and researchers at the “Thought Summit: LLMs and Society,” held May 19-21 in the ILR Conference Center, such errors aren’t harmless; they reveal a fundamental design problem and systemic issues, said Aditya Vashistha, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and the summit’s lead faculty organizer. AI tools are being designed by and for Western culture, which represents just 15% of the world’s population, but used around the globe, he said.