AI 'N Stuff

This week, my guest was Yohan Iddawela . Yohan is a geospatial data scientist at the Asian Development Bank and previously worked for the World Bank. He has a PhD in economic geography from the London School of Economics. In this episode, we talked about all things related to geospatial analysis, including fascinating use cases for geospatial data, the integral role of satellites, how AI and machi...

My guest this episode was Niceaunties, the pseudonym of a Singaporean-based AI artist that uses her cultural heritage and childhood experiences growing up with 11 aunties, plus parents and grandparents, as inspiration for an imaged reality she created called the Auntieverse, short for Auntie Universe. I spoke with nice aunties while she was exhibiting her work at the Zona Maco festival in Mexico C...

Earlier this spring, I had the chance to sit down in person with Professor Gabriel Weil here in New York to discuss his proposal for mitigating catastrophic risk from artificial intelligence. Professor Weil's proposal involves instituting a new punitive damages framework, which would increase defiance to AI companies in near miss scenarios where an AI generated harm was limited in its impact,...

Full show notes are available ⁠here⁠ . If you follow AI you’ve probably heard about the growing volume of proposed AI legislation in the U.S. and beyond as well as the increasing number of AI-related cases being brought before the courts. Today’s guest argues there is another industry that is a key in handling AI-inflicted harms. Everyone’s favorite, the insurance industry. Anat Lior is a professo...

This week, my guest was Eric Zhou , a PhD student at Boston University researching the impact of generative AI on art and artists. We discussed one of Eric's recent research projects, where he acquired access to a vast dataset of activity on a major online art platform. Eric used this data to assess how adopting generative AI tools impacted both the productivity and creativity of thousands of...

If you follow AI you might have heard the phrase, “ scale is all you need .” The idea that to continue to improve the performance of AI systems, all you need is bigger models and more data. But as AI has continued its rapid advancement the tide is starting to shift on that paradigm. Many of the new AI language and image models released in 2024 have been a fraction of the size of the models we saw...

There are currently 7,000 languages actively spoken in the world and about 40% are endangered , at risk of disappearing forever (see map below, click for a larger version). Can Generative AI systems help us with preservation and education about these languages via translation into English or other high-resource languages? Not today. Current state-of-the-art, off-the-shelf large language models lik...

Full show notes and a transcript are available on 96layers.ai . This week I spoke to Stefan Baack from the Mozilla Foundation about a recent research article he authored on the Common Crawl . The Common Crawl is the name of both a non-profit open-data company founded in 2008 by Gil Elbaz and the name of the associated dataset. The Common Crawl is one of the most important datasets in the Generativ...

Can ChatGPT be CEO? Can a robot buy a house? Could an AI produce a Hollywood blockbuster? Professor Shawn Bayern thinks the answer to these questions is yes. Professor Bayern is a legal scholar and professor of law at Florida State University who has written a book called " Autonomous Organizations ." In his book Professor Bayern outlines his argument that under today’s legal regime an A...

To learn more about AI generated defamation, I spoke with Professor Nina Brown from Syracuse University. Nina graduated from Cornell Law School and spent several years as a practicing attorney before joining Syracuse's Newhouse School of Public Communications . She now focuses on teaching communications law. Last year, Nina wrote an article with a delightful title, “ Bots Behaving Badly A Prod...

Full show notes for this episode can be found here: https://www.96layers.ai/p/will-ai-ever-become-a-person Have you ever considered what it truly means to be a person? I don't mean biologically, but from a philosophical standpoint, like what really defines personhood is a person. Someone that has common sense and can think and reason at a high level. Could a person be defined by having a disti...

Let's say you're on the edge of developing an awesome new AI language model. But here's a critical question – how do you ensure that your use of training data aligns with its licensing terms? How do you even find out what the licensing terms of that data are? Here’s another question: how do you find out where the dataset came from and what's inside? And how do you prevent the datas...

This week I talked to AI researcher Nina Beguš . Nina completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard University where she began creating a new practice called “ Artificial Humanities ,” the idea that history, literature, film, myth, and other humanities can help add depth to AI development, including in the design and engineering process. Nina is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Cal...

This week I stopped by De Montfort University in Leicester, England to speak with Dr. Kutoma Wakunuma, an expert on Responsible AI in Africa. We discussed opportunities and challenges, the importance of gender equality, and Ubuntu and Ujamma philosophies. Full show notes are available here .