AI for the Rest of Us

AI takes a huge amount of energy to run and could make it harder to fight climate change. On the other hand, AI could help make our energy systems more sustainable, efficient and safer. Three experts talk all things AI and energy with a live audience. The talk was part of a daylong symposium titled “ Policy Leadership in the Age of AI ”, hosted by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University...

Kara Swisher , the one-of-a-kind tech reporter, podcaster and book author, dropped by The University of Texas at Austin’s Cactus Café for a spirited conversation with a live audience about her concerns over the concentration of power in a few big tech companies, the capacity of tech to be used as both a tool and a weapon, her embrace of self-driving cars and her belief that AI will never replace h...

How much of our news is AI-generated right now and how might that change? With more and more misinformation posing as news, how can we sort out fact from fiction? And, in the face of falling revenue, can AI help save the news industry? Robert Quigley is a professor of practice in UT Austin’s Moody College of Communications where he teaches digital journalism and podcasting. As the director of medi...

Today on AI for the Rest of Us, we’re talking about AI and the law. What are the biggest risks of AI that are not currently regulated? Do the makers of AI chatbots like ChatGPT owe something to content creators whose material was scraped to train the models? What kinds of things could we do to make AI safer and more useful for everyone? And could too much regulation stifle innovation and US compet...

Today on AI for the Rest of Us , we’re talking about the ways that AI is being used—or might be used—to help make high-stakes decisions about all aspects of our lives—from who gets hired for a job—to what interest rates people get on loans—to whether or not someone who’s been convicted of a crime gets parole. Are AI systems better than humans at making these decisions? Why is it so tempting to giv...

Today on AI for the Rest of Us, we’re talking about AI in healthcare. There are a lot of wild claims about what AI can do to help make us healthier—so how can we figure out what’s real and what’s hype? And are there some potential pitfalls with these new technologies? Scott Graham is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the book  The Doctor and the...

Researchers in fields as diverse as astronomy, chemistry, neuroscience, biotechnology and public health are now using AI tools to look for patterns in their data, write code, find and summarize existing scientific literature, and even design experiments. Someday, scientific discoveries might even be made entirely by AI. We sat down with two guests for a bird’s eye view of how AI tools and approach...

Who will ultimately benefit from having more of our work done by AI—employees or employers? What about potential harms, like forcing us to spend time cleaning up mediocre products—pushing down wages—or eliminating jobs altogether? And how can we best prepare for working in an AI-powered future? Today on the show we have Maytal Saar-Tsechansky — a professor in the McCombs School of Business, who ha...

Artificial intelligence tools might transform education, for example, by giving every student 24/7 access to an affordable tutor that’s an expert in any subject and infinitely patient and supportive. But what if these AI tools give bad information or relieve students of the kind of critical thinking that leads to actual learning? And what’s the point of paying to go to college if you can learn eve...

Today we’re diving into the world of large language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude. When they burst onto the scene a couple of years ago, it felt like the future was suddenly here. Now people use them to write wedding toasts, decide what to have for dinner, compose songs and all sorts of writing tasks. Will these chatbots eventually get better than humans? Will they take o...

For our first episode, we’re starting with the big picture. What is (or isn’t) “artificial intelligence”? How can we be sure AI is safe and beneficial for everyone? And what is the best way of thinking about working with AI right now, no matter how we use it? Here with all the answers is Peter Stone. He’s a professor of computer science at UT Austin, director of  Texas Robotics , the executive dir...

We’re celebrating the launch of “AI for the Rest of Us”, a podcast to help get you up to speed on the essentials of artificial intelligence. Every two weeks, we’ll sit down with UT faculty experts and get them talking, in simple terms, about how AI might transform healthcare, work, the ways we learn and how we make big decisions. About AI for the Rest of Us AI for the Rest of Us is a joint pr...