14/02/2025
September Meeting - Dr Steve Weddell Generative AI is fundamentally reshaping how we live, work, and create, bringing a mixture of unprecedented breakthroughs and complex challenges. This talk provides a series of snapshots, which focus on the current AI revolution by breaking it down into three critical aspects. "The Good" highlights the massive productivity gains, creative amplification, and rapid problem-solving capabilities transforming industries worldwide. "The Bad" confronts the immediate practical hurdles, including escalating copyright disputes, deepfakes, workforce disruption, and the growing environmental footprint of massive data centres. "The Ugly" tackles the deeply unsettling existential risks, systemic algorithmic biases, and the weaponisation of misinformation that threaten our societal trust, along with the human cost of in generating training data using a method called “Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback” (RLHF).
