AI Ethics and IT Leadership | AI in Action 2023
Up until a year ago, for the general public, AI was an abstract product of someone’s sci-fi imagination. The launch of ChatGPT showed how unprepared the world was for it, and it brought to light some concerning issues.
Until laws and regulations can catch up to the AI locomotion, it is up to IT leaders to educate our organizations and decision-makers on how the use of this technology aligns with the needs, mission and constraints of the company.
Transcript
Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today. My name is Maria Moura. I am from the marketing team at the University of San Diego.
And joining us today is Dr. Paul Evans. He is the academic director for the MS and Information Technology Leadership Program.
Um, and I'll read a little bit more about his bio. Um, he's so talented that it's kind of hard to remember everything. Uh, so he combines about 20 years of experience from his technical and management career in IT with eight years of teaching experience in English history and computer science department, Dr.
Evans. Um, oh, sorry. Our talk today is about AI ethics and leader in IT leadership.
Dr. Evans, take it away. Hey, thank you Maria.
Just a little over a year ago on November 30th, 2022, OpenAI publicly released chat GPT an extraordinary advance in generative AI technology. Since then, other AI chatbot front ends to large language models such as Google's Bar and Anthropics Claude have made their debut chat. GPT in particular has made a tremendous impression on and has captured the collective imagination of the general public.
This event brought both the promise and the threat of generative AI technology out of the near term future, say the next five years abruptly into the present decision makers in government, business and education have shown themselves to be as unprepared for this revolutionary technical advance as the general public was. And they are scrambling so far without much success to catch up. For the past year, it has been impossible to escape the hype surrounding AI registration for today's AI in action event is a sign of that intense interest.
And I expect that anyone viewing this talk has spent a significant amount of time over the last year experimenting with ways to integrate the use of generative AI tools into their daily work lives. My comments today are particularly intended for those of you who are IT leaders, and by IT leaders, I don't just mean managers. It does not matter what your job title is or whether you are in charge of an organization with headcount, an org chart and a budget.
If you are in a position of influence in your organization that you have earned by your ability to effectively articulate the business value of information technology solutions, especially to non-technical decision, make decision makers and stakeholders, you are an IT leader. Or maybe to put it another way, if you have the technical expertise to craft innovative IT solutions and the credibility to be listened to when you propose them, you are an IT leader. It has been the case in the decades since Information technology, um, emerged as a competitive advantage for almost every organization, uh, in our society.
That it is the responsibility of IT leaders to understand and demystify new technologies to distinguish hype from reality and to communicate both possibilities and limitations to non-technical decision makers, especially those in the realms of business and politics. Despite wave after wave of technological change, the role of the I leader IT leader has been the same as it has been throughout the internet era to effectively communicate the business value of proposed information technology solutions to decision makers in terms that they understand and care about. That is the mission of the organization they lead and the resources and constraints within which that organization operates.
When articulating the business value of information technology solutions powered by generative ai, IT leaders must not only take into account the capabilities and limitations of the new technology, they must also fully take into consideration the unprecedented ethical challenges. These new technologies pose the garbage in garbage out rule that has been with us since the earliest days of computer programming holds true in the realm of generative ai. The results produced by chat GPT Barred and Claude are only as reliable in terms both of factual accuracy and freedom from bias as the data used to train the large language models that underlie the chatbot interface users interact with.
Probably everyone watching today has read about the court case in which two attorneys were sanctioned by a US Federal District Court for using chat GPT to prepare a filing. Because chat, chat GPT was found to have made up the case law at cited out of thin air in the realm of content creation chat. GPT is able to generate book length manuscripts in the voice and style of a specified author in seconds.
Tools like OpenAI's Dolly are able to generate visual images, reproducing the styles of well-known artists. And an emerging class of AI tools is able to generate music in the voices of living performers, potentially jeopardizing their livelihoods and possibly more settling in the voices of performers who are no longer alive. Each of these scenarios have significant ethical and in many cases, legal ramifications.
And until the law and regulation catch up, it will be the responsibility of IT leaders to educate their organizations on the appropriate use of generative AI technology. I will conclude by suggesting some questions that AI leaders should ask about any proposed use generative AI technology by their organization. Um, with the first three focused on the model for which the chat bot is the front end.
First was the model trained using high quality, factually accurate data. Second, was the data used to train the model obtained in a way that complies with current copyright. Third is the data used to train the model free from biased or politically extreme viewpoints.
And to the questions focusing on the model. I would add one more question about any proposed use of generative AI technology That is, does the proposed use in danger the livelihoods of content creators? Let's leave today not just with a glimpse of the challenges, but with a shared commitment to navigate them responsibly.
Thank you. Thank you Dr. Evans.
And for everybody who's interested in the offerings that the University of San Diego has, um, online degrees like the one we just spoke about, the MS and IT leadership, we also have a I and data science. Um, please visit our booth. We'll be happy to talk to you about all of all or any of the programs.
Thank you and hope to hear from you soon.
