Rumman Chowdhury on AI and the future ahead

Syracuse University welcomed artificial intelligence (AI) expert Rumman Chowdhury to campus on Wednesday as a part of the spring lecture series for her presentation, “Generative AI and the Future of Humanity.” 

Chowdhury is the CEO and co-founder of Humane Intelligence – a non-profit that researches and proposes applied solutions in AI technology. She also works in the field as a Responsible AI Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. 

The AI ethicist delivered a comprehensive presentation on the state of generative AI to a crowded audience in the Goldstein Auditorium. Chowdhury also emphasized the need for continuous improvement in both the training and application of AI systems. 

In August 2023, Chowdury hosted an AI event at the annual Def Con hacker conference. Thousands of hackers attending the conference in Las Vegas, Nevada gathered to test the bounds of popular generative AI platforms including Anthropic, ChatBGT and Google. The hackers’ applied research revealed harmful flaws in the technology, including racial and gender bias, inaccuracies and cybersecurity concerns. 

During her presentation, Chowdury reminded the audience that the true nature of generative AI differs from common perceptions of the technology: “AI isn’t smarter than all of us … It isn’t a magical creature that’s independently making abstract decisions that are too difficult for us to understand.”

Chowdhury also criticized “dystopian” media narratives of AI systems as counterproductive, noting several practices advanced by responsible AI including drug discovery, education and weather prediction. 

Following her presentation, university representatives Jamie Winders and Hamid Ekbia led a Q&A session with the audience. Winders is the associate provost for faculty affairs and Ekbia is a Maxwell professor and the director of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute. 

Chowdhury concluded with one main takeaway for the audience which largely consisted of university students: “We have to ensure that this technology is built to serve people, not the other way around.”

Photo by Theoplis Stewart II

An audience member listens during Rumman Chowdhury lecture about generative AI at Goldstein Auditorium.