In August I participated in a panel at the Scottish Parliament’s Festival of Politics. Entitled ‘Why we need to talk about AI’, we discussed a wide variety of issues relating to the growth in LLMs in contemporary societies.

The abstract for the panel is below:

Chatbots are transforming society, politics and business and it’s one of the biggest and fastest technological changes in history. Millions of people now talk to ChatGPT, daily. It has moved from novelty to everyday infrastructure astonishingly fast with people organising their finance to seeking therapy via machines. Some people use it to intensify their work productivity while others fall into dangerous conspiracy rabbit-holes and emotionally risky content. How do we learn how to talk– and not to talk to AI in a way that makes the most of technology rather than succumb to manipulation?

Big thanks to our chair Maggie Chapman MSP, the other panelists (Robert.P. Moran, Dr. Kate Orton-Johnson and Dr. Ronnie Smith) and the audience for contributing to an excellent discussion.

The video of the session is below: