Chat GPT and Other Creative Rivals

The Institute of Philosophy at the University of London and the  AI&Humanity-Lab at Hong Kong University ​are pleased to announce a  two-day conference on the philosophical issues surrounding large  language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.

LLMs are a  new type of artificial intelligence that are able to generate text,  translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and  answer your questions in an informative way. They are trained on massive  datasets of text and code, and they are still under development, but  they have already learned to perform many kinds of tasks that were once  thought to be the exclusive domain of humans.

 The  conference will bring together leading experts from academia and  industry to discuss a range of philosophical issues surrounding LLMs,  including:

• The nature of intelligence: Are LLMs intelligent? If so, what kind of intelligence do they have?
• The  ethics of LLMs: What are the ethical implications of using LLMs? How  can we ensure that they are used for good and not for harm?
• The future of LLMs: What are the potential benefits and risks of LLMs? How will they shape our world in the future?

The  conference will be of interest to philosophers, computer scientists,  policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of artificial  intelligence.

This conference  will take place at Senate House and will also be streamed online via  Zoom.  If you would like to join remotely please sign up here. You will be sent the zoom information via email once you  complete the registration process.

This event is co-organised by the Institute of Philosophy, SAS and the AI&Humanity-Lab at Hong Kong University. ​

Participating speakers

• Catherine Clark (SAS)(Opens in new window)
• Rosa Cao (Stanford)(Opens in new window)
• Nigel Shadbolt (Oxford)(Opens in new window)
• Josh Dever (Texas)(Opens in new window)
• Herman Cappelen (Hong Kong)(Opens in new window)
• Murray Shanahan (Imperial College & Deepmind)(Opens in new window)
• David Papineau (King's College London)(Opens in new window)
• Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm)(Opens in new window)
• Jackie Kay (Deepmind)
• Geoffrey Hinton (Toronto)(Opens in new window)
• Gary Marcus (NYU)(Opens in new window)

Postdoc speakers

• Ryan Born (University of Texas at Austin)
• William Chan (Southampton)
• Karen Lancaster (Nottingham)

Schedule

Day 1 – May 31

9.30 Coffee & Welcome

10:00 – 11.15 Nigel Shadbolt (Oxford) - From So Simple a Beginning: Understanding Large Language Models

11.15 – 12.30 Rosa Cao (Stanford) - Do language models think and talk like we do?

12.30 -13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 14.45 Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm) - Can Large Language Models Understand Natural Language?

14.45. – 15.00 Coffee

15.00 – 16.15 Murray Shanahan (Imperial College and Deepmind) - Role-play with Large Language Models

16.15 – 17.30 Geoffrey Hinton (Toronto) - Qualia are the phlogiston of cognitive science

17:45 - 19:00 Keynote: Gary Marcus (NYU) - Title TBC.  (Presenting virtually)

Day 2 - 1st June

10:00 – 11.15      Josh Dever (Texas) and Herman Cappelen (Hong Kong) - ChatGPT Has Beliefs: Methodology and Arguments

11.15 – 12.45      Postdoc session

• Ryan Born (University of Texas at Austin) - Originality, Forgery, and Irreplaceability: AI-rtists and their limits
• Karen  Lancaster (Nottingham) - “That’s exactly what they would have said!”  Why AI should not be used to generate real people’s putative statements  without their consent
• William Chan (Southampton) - Powerful Chatbots and Liberal Education

12.45 – 13.45 Lunch

13.45 – 15.00 Catherine Clarke (SAS) - Absences, Ghosts, Ethics: Using AI to Re-Visit Gaps in the Historical Archive

15.00 – 15.15 Coffee

15.15 – 16.30 Jackie Kay (Deepmind) - Embodiment, Intelligence, and the Alien Creativity of Large Generative Models

16:30 - 17:45 David Papineau (King's College London) - The Coming Moral Crisis and What We Might Do About It

(videos of this event can be seen in our video archive)