Valerie Turner, AVP (IT) and Chief Information Officer (CIO), spoke during a plenary session at Carleton University’s Data Day 9.0 event on April 25, 2023.
She was joined by fellow panelists Robin Grosset of Mindbridge AI and Andrew Price of Amazon Web Services for a discussion on Disruptive AI and its Economic Impact. The session was moderated by Maria DeRosa, Professor of Chemistry and Dean of Science.
The discussion covered a wide range of issues around the recent and rapid emergence of AI tools based on large language models, including their economic and social effects.
Turner’s thoughts on these issues often went to the social and human impacts of these tools, and how they would change the course of human development.
“If we think of where tools like ChatGPT are drawing their training data from, it’s the first 30 years of the internet which, by definition, were not very inclusive or open,” said Turner during the session. “This data likely has a very narrow perspective.
“We see this in other areas of technology. For example, crash test dummies were not necessarily built to resemble the women in this room. And a lot of drug trials are done in a very narrow demographic. When you take that base and expand it through algorithms, are you really creating an inclusive data set? Is that foundation really the one we want to use to accelerate human potential?”
Data Day is a becoming widely known as a must-attend event for those studying or working in data science, analytics and related fields. This year’s theme was The Data-Driven Economy. The event featured the work of Carleton Data Science students, who displayed their research for attendees in a poster competition.
