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 

Generative AI and Academic Blogging: A Beginner’s Guide

January marks the anniversary of this blog, and it has become a tradition for me to use this occasion to write a post sharing insights and tips to help other academics in leveraging the power of blogging for public engagement. This year, as the blog turns fourteen, I want to look at how Generative Artificial … Continue reading Generative AI and Academic Blogging: A Beginner’s Guide

December 2023 round-up

In December, I spent a lot of money and ate a lot of sugar. I was elated with some friends’ news, and really sad with another friend’s loss. I spent time with people that make my life better, and time with myself to reflect on the past year and set some goals for the next one.  … Continue reading December 2023 round-up

[Miscellany]: Failing to foresee the current state of AI; AI replacing vs augmenting jobs; and regulation of AI in the EU

Failing to foresee the current state of AI The last 14 months or so have seen incredible change in AI technology. AI has progressed beyond a level that many analysts thought it would take many years – or, indeed, many decades – to achieve. In this blog post, Scott Aaronson, who is a computer scientist at … Continue reading [Miscellany]: Failing to foresee the current state of AI; AI replacing vs augmenting jobs; and regulation of AI in the EU