The symposium, which attracted hundreds of people from academia and industry to the Kresge Auditorium of the Institute, was laced with messages of hope about the opportunities generative AI offers for making the world a better place, including through art and creativity. It was also interspersed with stories of what could go wrong if these AI tools were not developed responsibly.
Machine-learning models that learn to generate new data that resembles the data they were trained on are referred to as “generative AI.” These models have demonstrated some incredible capabilities, including the capacity to translate languages, create functional computer code, create human-like creative writing, and create realistic images from text prompts.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth talked about a number of projects that faculty and students have done to use generative AI to make a difference in the world in her opening remarks for the symposium. For instance, crafted by the Axim Cooperative, a web-based instruction drive sent off by MIT and Harvard, incorporates investigating the instructive parts of generative simulated intelligence to help underserved understudies.