Ethics in AI Colloquium - Reflection on the Nature of (Artificial) Intelligence and Creativity

This event is part of the Artful Intelligence Season and is brought to you by the the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. 

Artists were assumed to be among the hardest jobs to be replaced by AI, yet the newest greatest AI challenges our prior assumption. In this talk, I will reflect on the nature of intelligence and creativity, both artificial and natural, and the implications of generative AI on what it means to be creative, artistic, and human.  

You can book to attend for free here or you can join us online via YouTube livestream. 

The Institute for Ethics in AI will bring together world-leading philosophers and other experts in the humanities with the technical developers and users of AI in academia, business and government. The ethics and governance of AI is an exceptionally vibrant area of research at Oxford and the Institute is an opportunity to take a bold leap forward from this platform.

Every day brings more examples of the ethical challenges posed by AI; from face recognition to voter profiling, brain machine interfaces to weaponised drones, and the ongoing discourse about how AI will impact employment on a global scale. This is urgent and important work that we intend to promote internationally as well as embedding in our own research and teaching here at Oxford.

Speaker

Professor Yejin Choi is Brett Helsel professor and a MacArthur Fellow at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is also a senior director at AI2 overseeing the project Mosaic and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates if (and how) AI systems can learn commonsense knowledge and reasoning, if machines can (and should) learn moral reasoning, and various other problems in AI that involve language, knowledge, and reasoning. She is a co-recipient of two Test of Time Awards (ACL 2021 and ICCV 2021) and several Best Paper Awards at top venues in AI (NAACL 2022, ICML 2022, NeurIPS 2021, AAAI 2019, and ICCV 2013).

Commentators 

Estella Tse is a Virtual & Augmented Reality Creative Director and Artist. She integrates emerging technologies and visual storytelling into a new art form. She inspires new ways to connect, educate, and build empathy with her creative innovation work. Estella has been an artist-in-residence with Google, Adobe, Snapchat, Cartoon Network Studios, performs and speaks internationally. Her work has been featured on Forbes, CNet, The Australian, and more. She draws her inspiration from lived human experiences, nature, and the cosmos. Estella is proudly from Oakland, CA and currently lives in Portland, OR. You can find more of Estella's work at www.estellatse.com and @estellatse 

Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, podcaster, and writer. He is best known as the main interviewer for the Philosophy Bites podcast and as author of A Little History of Philosophy. His other books include The Art Question, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, Thinking from A to Z, a biography of the architect Ernö Goldfinger and an edited volume about the photographer Bill Brandt. He has a weekly column ‘Everyday Philosophy’ in The New European newspaper and is a consultant commissioning editor for Aeon.co and the philosophy editor for www.fivebooks.com.

Chair 

Paul Holdengräber is an interviewer and curator. He was the Founding Executive Director of Onassis Los Angeles (OLA). Previously, and for 14 years, he was Founder and Director of The New York Public Library’s LIVE from the NYPL cultural series where he interviewed and hosted over 600 events, holding conversations with everyone from Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Ricky Jay to Jay-Z, Errol Morris to Jan Morris, Wes Anderson to Helen Mirren, Werner Herzog to Mike Tyson.Before his tenure at the Library, Holdengräber was the Founder and Director of “The Institute for Art & Cultures” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and has taught at Princeton University, Williams College, Claremont Graduate University among others. In 2003, the French Government named Holdengräber Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and then promoted him in 2012 to the rank of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2010, The President of Austria awarded him the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.