Artificial intelligence

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Fast Company reporter Natalie Nixon about the risks of offloading creative work to AI systems. In one study, Aral and his colleagues found that with more creative work outsourced to AI, there was a resulting “slow homogenization of output that occurs when AI, trained on the same publicly available internet, starts flattening the edges that make creative work distinctive.” In another study, Aral’s team found, “cognitive offloading to AI (the act of outsourcing tasks you could do yourself) erodes the very skills you’re handing off.” 

Writing for MassLive, Scott Kirsner highlights Gander Robotics, a startup co-founded by Sloan graduate student Michael Autery, that is “developing a torpedo-like device that is light enough to be tossed over the side of a ship — and designed to find a person in the water.” Autery, who served 15 years in the U.S. Navy, first pitched the idea for an “autonomous rescue swimmer” as part of an MIT entrepreneurship competition and notes: “if I had the same idea in a different place at the same time, I’m not sure it would’ve played out the same way. Cambridge is this very rich ecosystem for entrepreneurship.”

Prof. Asu Ozdaglar, head of EECS and deputy dean of academics for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, speaks with Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace about how MIT is preparing its students for the era of AI by teaching foundational skills that will enable them to find jobs in a variety of different sectors. The new Artificial Intelligence + Decision Making major (AI+D) teaches students about the “foundations of how to use this intelligence for enhancing human experience, human work, human education, all of those domains, so that no matter how the technology changes, these students can adapt their skills to the new set of tools and developments.”

In an article for Forbes, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota '08 MS '16, MBA '16 explores how “AI is now embedded in the critical path of drug discovery, and it is making consequential decisions at a speed and scale that existing governance structures were simply not designed to handle.” Hayes-Mota emphasizes: “The goal is to ensure that as AI accelerates the machine of drug development, we have deliberate mechanisms for human accountability threaded through every critical junction.” 

New research co-authored by Prof. Michiel Bakker examines the impact of using AI tools on an individual’s ability to solve a set of math problems, writes Jude Cramer for Fast Company. The researchers found that participants “who asked the AI for direct solutions saw the largest decline in solve rate and the largest increase in skip rate.” 

A new study co-authored by Sloan graduate student Anand Shah explores the growing use of AI across the legal system, reports Chris Stokel-Walker for Fast Company. “The pro se share of all civil cases has been 11% for quite some time,” says Shah. “And then in the post-AI world, we see it jumping all the way up to something like 18%.”

In an interview with CNN reporter Madeline Holcombe, Prof. Sherry Turkle shares her views on AI tools and companionship, and how AI chatbots can impact social connection and isolation. “Intimacy requires vulnerability — there is no intimacy without vulnerability,” says Turkle. “What AI offers is connection without vulnerability. You are not getting a sustaining form of intimacy and connection. You are getting a non-nourishing combination that may give the sense of a quick fix, but is not sustaining.” 

CBS News reporter Aimee Picchi spotlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s recent comments on using AI for retirement planning. “Lo stressed that it's important to ask critical questions when using AI for retirement advice, such as prompting an AI to say where it might be wrong and to list its assumptions and uncertainties,” writes Picchi. 

Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with WBUR’s Priyanka Dayal McCluskey about her work developing an AI risk detection tool that can analyze mammogram images and help predict risk of breast cancer before it happens or spreads. Barzilay, who describes the tool as a hi-tech weather forecast for breast health, notes that: “We really need to have tools that can help, rather than just staring at an image and trying to guess.” 

Sybil, a new AI tool developed by researchers from MIT and Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, “analyzes a single CT scan and generates a risk score predicting the likelihood of developing lung cancer over a period of up to six years,” reports Ivan Rodriguez for WCVB-TV. “In 2023, researchers reported that Sybil achieved an accuracy rate of 86% to 94% in distinguishing high-risk patients from low-risk patients within a year.”

Cambridge Day reporter Zoe Beketova, a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, visits Prof. Xuanhe Zhao’s lab to get a hands-on look at the group’s ultrasound wristband that can map movements of the human body using sound waves, part of the group’s work aimed at changing “how we gather information from inside the body.” Says Zhao: “The mission of my lab is really merging humans with machines and AI. We believe there’s a huge opportunity [with] this interface.”

Fortune reporter Preston Fore spotlights Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee’s remarks warning against using AI technologies to replace entry level jobs. “How else are people going to learn to do the job except via on-the-job learning and training apprenticeship?” said McAfee. “That’s how you learn to do difficult knowledge work is by helping somebody who’s good at that with the routine stuff. And when we put too much automation in that too quickly, we lose that apprenticeship ladder.”

Reporting for CNN, Caleb Hellerman spotlights how MIT computer scientists developed an AI program called Sybil that can “‘look’ at a single CT scan and generate a ‘risk score’ corresponding to the likelihood of the person developing cancer over any period up to six years.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins Slate’s “Money Talks” podcast to explain his research into pro-worker technologies and how we can not only avoid the AI job apocalypse but also improve workers’ lives by shifting the goal of AI from automation to collaboration. “Artificial intelligence is quite different than human intelligence,” says Acemoglu. “And when two things are different, a natural way to combine them is in a complimentary way.”

Prof. Xuanhe Zhao speaks with Tech Briefs reporter Andrew Corselli about his team’s work developing an ultrasound wristband that precisely tracks a wearer’s hand movements in real time and can communicate device these motions to a robot or a virtual environment. “For the future of human society, humanized robots will do lots of different work for us. For that work, we need a dexterous robotic hand,” explains Zhao. “We believe this ultrasound wristband, based on variable imaging, could be the future of really knowing the human hand motions.”