Washington Post reporter Kevin Schaul examines the impact of AI on a number of fields, highlighting a recent study co-authored by graduate student Anand Shah that found that over the past few years there appears to have been an increase in self-represented and AI-generated legal filings. “Every system that has decreased cost to entry from AI should expect increased demand,” says Shah.
Prof. Taha Choukhmane co-authored a new study examining how Americans are using AI in their financial planning and found that “AI consistently gave better advice to people who asked better questions,” reports Daniel de Visé for USA Today. “It might be that AI is going to be a little more useful for people who already know a little bit about finance and financial literacy,” Choukhmane explains.
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.”
Profs. Elisabeth Reynolds and Simon Johnson joined Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney on Bloomberg Surveillance to discuss their new book, "Priority Technologies: Ensuring U.S. Security and Shared Prosperity," which highlights six key areas where advances in technology can drive the U.S. economy and support national security. “Quantum is the next frontier and opens up billions of dollars of opportunity,” says Reynolds. “Not just for defense and encryption issues, but also across all sorts of applications in financial services and biopharma.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
A new working paper by researchers from MIT FutureTech finds that “AI’s march through the labor market looks far less like a sudden catastrophe and far more like a slow, rising flood — serious and accelerating, but not the overnight apocalypse that has dominated headlines and executive anxiety for the past two years,” writes Nick Lichtenberg for Fortune. “Rather than arriving in crashing waves that transform a certain set of tasks at a time,” the researchers write, “progress typically resembles a rising tide, with widespread gains across many tasks simultaneously.”
Two new studies from researchers at MIT and elsewhere have described “the machine-learning algorithms they developed to screen bacterial genomes and identify proteins that are involved in protecting the microorganisms against viral invaders,” reports Miryam Naddaf for Nature. “There’s a hope that maybe there’s a next generation of molecular tools that would come from some of these new systems,” says Prof. Michael Laub.
Prof. Adam Berinsky speaks with Washington Post reporter Shira Ovide about American’s relationship with AI and social media. “Berinsky said the unfavorable opinions about AI aren’t that bad compared with Americans’ low confidence in many institutions, including big business, Congress and newspapers,” writes Ovide.
Prof. John Horton speaks with CNN reporter Harmeet Kaur about the use of the world “agentic” in describing AI. “My sense is that it’s a word that’s useful to describe software that acts a bit more like a person does,” says Horton.
Writing for Forbes, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota 08, SM '16, MBA '16 explores how businesses can best prepare for the rapid advancements underway in the field of neurotechnology. “I believe that one of the most important steps companies can take regarding this emerging technology is to act now, without waiting for regulatory clarity first,” writes Hayes-Mota. “Treat neural data as categorically sensitive from day one—not because you are forced to, but because you understand that operating this close to the human mind demands a higher threshold of trust than almost any technology before it.”
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Danielle Li examines the risks for highly skilled workers whose expertise is used as training data for AI systems. “As workers, people should think about how to use AI to expand their skills: whether by building complementary capabilities or by finding ways to scale their expertise through AI systems,” Li writes. “As citizens, they should press for policies that give workers clearer rights over the data generated by their work and compensation for it.”
Visiting Senior Lecturer Paul McDonagh-Smith speaks with Newsweek reporter Adam Mills about how AI implementation across organizations can have impacts on business oversight and governance. “The organizations I’ve seen moving fastest have built governance systems early enough that they become a permission structure, rather than a constraint,” says McDonagh-Smith.