On the 28th of September 2023, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) opened its doors to the public and organized a public lecture: "Between Hope and Hype - Ethical Aspects of Generative AI." The speaker, Alena Buyx, works on the ethics of medicine and is the director of the Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine at the Technical University of Munich.
ISTA, under the Young Lounge program, offers an opportunity for interested high school students to interact with the speaker. Students of class 5B and 6B took this opportunity and had a discussion with the speaker prior to the public lecture.
Generative AI (ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.) has exploded into the world, and suddenly, both doom scenarios and utopian visions are being hotly discussed in talk shows, on the news, and at dinner tables. While ethicists are delighted that the implications of wider AI use have found their way into the wider public debate, these discussions should benefit from long-standing work on the ethical and social aspects of AI. Ethics and other related fields have long discussed ways to use and integrate AI into individual lifeworlds and society responsively. This talk offered an overview of ethical issues and discussed the advantages, risks, and ways forward in using AI for individual and social good.
