Newspapers and social media are ablaze with big headlines about Artificial Intelligence: “ChatGPT: Here to replace the writers and coders?”, “AI lawyer to fight first legal case in court, startup claims”, “Want a job? You'll have to convince our AI bot first”. Such headlines can give the impression that AI systems may think, reason, and act like we do, and so be able soon to replace us. On the other hand, researchers and policy makers warn about keeping the focus on humans: AI should be transparent about its capabilities, respect privacy, put human well-being first.
Between human replacement and human-focused, where is AI today? In this interactive event, we will discuss the hype around AI, including the latest text and image generation systems, and the metaverse. We will consider questions like: Who benefits from the hype? How justified is it? How do these narratives change our attitudes towards technology?