Symposium: Generative AI, Free Speech & Public Discourse
Columbia Engineering and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia are co-hosting panels with multidisciplinary experts to debate artificial intelligence and its impact on the future of public discourse, free expression, and democracy.
About this Event
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E can aid society in a number of ways, but could also bring a fresh deluge of disinformation, threaten free elections, and destabilize democracies. As these tools become widely available, cheaper, and more powerful, how can self-governing societies limit the potential of generative AI to shape — or distort — public discourse? How might we harness technology to address some of the feared harms resulting from the use of generative AI? Which harms require political solutions? What goals should guide our work over the next decade?
This event will feature several keynote speakers and panel discussions with experts from law, computer science, social science, history, and other disciplines. Our guest speakers will discuss topics ranging from AI and human creativity, information integrity and power and governance.
Co-sponsored by Columbia Engineering and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia
Schedule
Welcome Remarks
Speaker: Shih-Fu Chang (Dean, Columbia Engineering), Jameel Jaffer (Executive Director, Knight First Amendment Institute)
Time: 11:00 AM – 11:15 AM
Location: Forum Auditorium
Opening Remarks from Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Dean Shih-Fu Chang, and Knight First Amendment Institute Executive Director Jameel Jaffer at a collaborative symposium exploring the intersections of generative AI and public discourse.
Keynote 1A: Opening up the language model black box
Speaker: Tatsu Hashimoto, Stanford University
Time: 11:15 AM – 11:45 AM
Location: Forum Auditorium
Keynote presentation from Stanford University Assistant Professor Tatsunori Hashimoto exploring recent advancements in natural language processing models, as well as efforts to better evaluate and improve these models' trustworthiness over time. Followed by a fireside chat with Columbia Engineering Vice Dean Garud Iyengar.
Keynote 1B: Challenges for Conversational AI in the Era of LLM
Speaker: Dilek Hakkani Tur, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Time: 11:45 AM – 12:15 AM
Location: Forum Auditorium
A keynote presentation from University of Illinois Professor Dilek Hakkani-Tur exploring challenges for conversational AI in the era of large language models (LLMs). Followed by a fireside chat with Columbia Engineering Professor Kathy McKeown.
Lunch
Time: 12:15 PM
Location: West Atrium
Panel 1: Empirical and Technological Questions: Current Landscape, Challenges, and Opportunities
Moderator: Shih-Fu Chang, Dean, Columbia Engineering
Panelists: Kathy McKeown (Columbia Engineering), Alex Jaimes (Dataminr), Carl Vondrick (Columbia Engineering), Smaranda Muresan (Barnard College), Arvind Narayanan (Princeton University)
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM
Location: Forum Auditorium
Expert panel discussion exploring empirical and technological questions, the current landscape, challenges, and opportunities in generative AI.
Break
Time: 2:15 PM – 2:30 PM
Location: West Atrium
Seed Funding Presentations
Intro: Alberto Ibargüen, Katy Glenn Bass, Samar Kaukab
Presenters: Kathy McKeown, Lena Song, Carl Vondrick, Xia Zhou
Time: 2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Location: Forum Auditorium
Seed funding presentations exploring new developments in generative AI and their applications to public discourse and free speech questions.
Keynote 2: AI and Trust
Speaker: Bruce Schneier, Harvard Kennedy School
Time: 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Location: Forum Auditorium
Keynote presentation from cryptographer and Harvard Kennedy School Lecturer Bruce Schneier exploring how conceptions trust and security apply to rapidly advancing AI technologies. Followed by a fireside chat with Knight Institute Executive Director Jameel Jaffer
Break
Time: 3:30 PM – 3:45 PM
Location: West Atrium
Panel 2: Legal and Philosophical Questions: Information Integrity, Trustworthiness, and the First Amendment
Moderator: Katy Glenn Bass, Research Director, Knight First Amendment Institute
Panelists: Mike Ananny (University of Southern California), James Grimmelmann (Cornell Law School), Camille Francois (Columbia School of International and Public Affairs), Nadine Farid Johnson (Knight First Amendment Institute)
Time: 3:45 PM – 5:00 PM
Location: Forum Auditorium
Expert panel discussion exploring legal and philosophical questions, information integrity, trustworthiness, and the First Amendment as related to rapidly advancing Generative AI technologies.
Closing Remarks
Speaker: Shih-Fu Chang and Jameel Jaffer
Time: 5:00 PM – 5:15 PM
Location: Forum Auditorium
Closing remarks from Columbia Engineering Dean Shih-Fu Chang and Knight Institute Executive Director Jameel Jaffer.
Reception
Time: 5:15 PM – 7:00 PM
Location: West Atrium
Keynote Presentation Abstracts
Opening up the language model black box
Tatsunori B. Hashimoto, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Stanford University
Advances in large language models have brought about exciting advancements in capabilities, but the commercialization of this technology has led to an increasing loss of transparency. State-of-the-art language models effectively operate as black boxes, with many things unknown about their training algorithms, data annotators, and pertaining data. Reasoned public discourse about language models requires a deeper understanding of how these systems are constructed, and this talk will mention several approaches — including open-source models and benchmarking, watermarking, and membership inference — for gaining important insights into the behavior of these language models.
Challenges for Conversational AI in the Era of LLMs
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Recent large language models (LLMs) have enabled significant advancements for open-domain dialogue systems due to their ability to generate coherent natural language responses to many user requests. However, these models suffer from limitations, such as, hallucination, undesired capturing of biases, difficulty in generalization to specific policies, and lack of interpretability. To tackle these issues, the natural language processing community proposed methods, such as, injecting knowledge into language models during training or inference, retrieving related knowledge using multi-step inference and API/tools, and so on. In this talk, I plan to provide a brief overview of our and others’ work that aim to address these challenges.
AI and Trust
Bruce Schneier, Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School
For AI to be trusted, it must be trustworthy. This won't happen with the current market incentives. If we are ever to realize the full potential for generative AI in public discourse, we need something different.
Seed Projects
These projects are supported by seed funds from Columbia Engineering and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University:
- Protecting the Integrity of Live Speech Videos with Modulated Ambient Light | Xia Zhou (Computer Science)
- Enabling Unbiased Summarization of Opinions from Vulnerable Groups | Kathy McKeown (Computer Science)
- Making Public Law: Artificial Intelligence for Legal Accessibility and Judicial Legitimacy | Lena Song (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, SSRC Digital Platforms Initiative)
- Detecting AI-Generated Content via Rewriting | Carl Vondrick (Computer Science) (on behalf of Junfeng Yang)
Speakers
 Mike Ananny University of Southern California |
 Katy Glenn Bass Knight First Amendment Institute |
 Shih-Fu Chang Columbia Engineering |
 Camille François Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs |
 James Grimmelmann Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School |
 Dilek Hakkani-Tür University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
 Tatsunori B. Hashimoto Stanford University |
 Alberto Ibargüen Knight Foundation (2003-2023) |
 Garud Iyengar Columbia Engineering |
 Jameel Jaffer Knight First Amendment Institute |
 Alex Jaimes Dataminr |
 Nadine Farid Johnson Knight First Amendment Institute |
 Samar Kaukab Columbia Engineering |
 Kathy McKeown Columbia Engineering, Data Science Institute |
 Smaranda Muresan Columbia Engineering, Data Science Institute |
 Arvind Narayanan Princeton University |
 Bruce Schneier Harvard University |
 Lena Song University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, SSRC Digital Platforms Initiative |
 Carl Vondrick Columbia Engineering |
 Xia Zhou Columbia Engineering |
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Event Details
Date: Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Time: 11:00 AM – 5:15 PM
Location: The Forum, 601 W 125th St, New York, NY 10027