Generative AI

Generative AI refers to a class of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that produce outputs such as text, images, datasets, or other media in response to user prompts. These technologies typically leverage machine learning (ML) or large language models (LLMs) to identify patterns in a training data set and use those patterns to generate the outputs.

In an article from Carnegie Council's Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative (AIEI) titled “Now is the Moment for a Systemic Reset of AI and Technology Governance,” Senior Fellows Wendell Wallach and Anja Kaspersen highlight the “awe-inspiring” progress that generative AI tech has made in recent years while providing the caveat that algorithms behind these solutions “can ferret out and regurgitate insightful words and concepts, but there is no sense in which it understands the depth of meaning these words and concepts carry.”

The speed, ease of use, and accessibility of this technology introduces ethical challenges for businesses, schools and universities, and individuals alike. There are intellectual property and copyright concerns that led Amazon to warn employees not to share code with ChatGPT. For academic institutions, depending on how students leverage generative AI, acceptable research and homework practices could suffer.

For more on this topic, find articles, podcasts, and off-site resources below created and curated by Carnegie Council’s network.

1. Is it ethical for someone to create content using generative AI without disclosing that generative AI was used?
2. Should AI-generated content such as images, videos, and other media be subject to copyright laws? If so, who should hold the copyrights?
3. Should generative AI be regulated to ensure it's used in an ethically permissible way? What might this kind of regulation look like?
4. How can generative AI tools be designed to minimize biases?
5. Should using generative AI be prohibited in certain contexts, ie. for a student completing homework, for users creating fake news or propaganda, for an entertainment company creating a deep fake image or video, etc?