[Miscellany] IWD 2024: Women spies, Barbie v Oscars, and online gender harassment

In honour of International Women’s Day 2024, I thought I would share with you the links to three really interesting stories about women. 1 The secret lives of MI6’s women spies A FT Weekend podcast episode about what it’s like for women to work in espionage.  It discusses how difficult it is to be taken … Continue reading [Miscellany] IWD 2024: Women spies, Barbie v Oscars, and online gender harassment

February 2024 round-up

February is one of my favourite months of the year: the days are visibly getting lighter, the flowers are coming through, and… it’s my birthday. What’s not to like? This month’s productivity was a bit disrupted due to health issues in the family, and technical problems. Still, I managed to tick off various items from … Continue reading February 2024 round-up

Accountability for chatbot errors: Air Canada’s legal battle

When Air Canada’s chatbot gave wrong information to a customer, and the customer complained, the airline argued that it was not responsible for the chatbot’s mistakes. They tried to get away from honouring the wrong information provided by the chatbot, saying that the customer should have consulted the company’s website instead. Canadian courts disagreed, and … Continue reading Accountability for chatbot errors: Air Canada’s legal battle

Conversations with AI – Where functional meets emotional value

BBC News has an interesting article about AI, entitled “The AI companions you can have conversations with”.  These “AI companions” are a form of conversational AI which, like Alexa, can interact with users through voice recognition and natural language processing. However, unlike Alexa, they can also recognise emotion and use empathy to craft their interactions. … Continue reading Conversations with AI – Where functional meets emotional value

Open Call to managers and to business researchers: your testimonials and suggestions, for my Research Methods module, please

Inspired by my colleague Chirantan Chatterjee, I am making an #OpenCall for suggestions of resources for my Research Methods module, which is starting this week. Over 11 weeks, 96 MSc Management students will be exploring the relevance of research for managers, and how to plan and execute a research project. The first assessment is a mini literature … Continue reading Open Call to managers and to business researchers: your testimonials and suggestions, for my Research Methods module, please

A framework to decide whether and how to use generative AI chatbots

Since the early days of Open AI’s release of ChatGPT 3.5, many voices have alerted to the fact that, while generative AI tools produce very convincing answers, they are also prone to making up information. This propensity is referred to as hallucination. Concerns over generative AI’s propensity for hallucination are almost as prevalent as enthusiasm for … Continue reading A framework to decide whether and how to use generative AI chatbots

Thoughts on the privacy threats and personalisation opportunities of qualitative inference with large language models 

I have come across the paper entitled “Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy Via Inference with Large Language Models”, authored by Robin Staab, Mark Vero, Mislav Balunović and Martin Vechev. Staab and his team investigated “whether current LLMs could violate individuals' privacy by inferring personal attributes from text”. Using prompts and techniques that, to me, seem quite … Continue reading Thoughts on the privacy threats and personalisation opportunities of qualitative inference with large language models