New Series Offers Quick Insights on Today’s Issues
Quick Insight is a series of short videos in which experts from academe and the larger community surrounding the academy address a single issue in which their expertise and lived experiences gives them special insight. The issue may be related to a research question, and pressing current headline, or an examination of the infrastructure supporting higher education.
Each edition will see the guest face the camera and after introducing themselves launch into the question they will address. The videos aren’t intended to be the last word on their subject matter, but more like the first one offered at the beginning of a friendly conversation with a knowledgeable and engaging friend.
The first dozen videos in the series will post weekly through August 25. Links to the videos in the series will appear below as they post.
Mahzarin Banaji on the Bias in the Machine
Mazarin Banaji, the experimental psychologist at Harvard University widely known for the implicit association test she and her colleagues developed, has spent decades studying how unconscious processes shape human decisions. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Banaji and colleagues began investigating whether these AI systems also would contain implicit biases. The answer is yes, and in fact, drawing on work by Alex Todorov, she notes that that LLMs not only replicate human biases but sometimes amplify them.
